Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Household employees on television. Television programs"

Disaster awareness and household preparedness are crucial for reducing the negative effects of a disaster. This study aims to examine the citizens’ preparedness level in the event of a general disaster or outbreak of infectious disease and to identify suitable channels for community disease surveillance and risk communication. We used a stratified random design to conduct a digit-dialed telephone survey in Hong Kong during February 2014. Level of disaster preparedness was examined according to the possession of disaster kit items. Associations between socio-demographic factors and good household preparedness were assessed using multiple logistic regression models. Preferences for infectious disease surveillance were collected and analyzed. There were 1020 respondents. Over half of the respondents (59.2%) had good household preparedness. After adjustment, female respondents, having higher education and higher household income were significantly associated with good household preparedness. Television and telephone were the preferred channels to obtain and report infectious disease information, respectively. In conclusion, general and specific infectious-disease household preparedness levels in Hong Kong were generally good. Tailored preparedness programs targeted to specific communities are necessary for those lacking preparedness. Risk communication and public health surveillance should be conducted through television and telephone, respectively.

The television series are viewed from the perspective of their potential educational role. It is noted that television as a whole, and separately its component – the television series, remain an influential form of media communication of our time, despite the diversification of the delivery channels of the media message and the rapid spread of digital devices. In the complex hierarchy of TV formats, genres and niches, the television educational series, when it had being appear, became a hybrid documentary broadcast format. Considering the specificity of the video footage, television as a media is characterized by a high potential for reliable reflection of reality (another thing is how television channels operate on this potential). It is no wonder, then, that scientific documentary, as a genre, existed since the "pre-television" era. The focus is on documentary television series that can directly perform educational functions. It is generalized the idea of creating of the television series that are specifically designed for educational purposes and which can be part of relevant educational programs. It is substantiated the expediency of using educational serials on special educational television channels that are already operating abroad and just beginning to develop in Ukraine. It is emphasized that in the broad sense of the word, all television series, even entertaining ones, have a certain educational function – through the translation of certain ideas, values and patterns of behavior embodied by the characters of these serials. Typical popular documentary series of recent decades have been analyzed in terms of their specific educational functions. It is substantiated that documentary serials of the present day are able to relay information of a household, scientific and educational value, which should partially rehabilitate both television and television series for educational functions, which are guarded by the culture of any level of the organization. Despite belonging to one television format, science and education serials communicate at the level of iconic and index characters, and more entertaining reality shows are saturated with symbolic signs. Because of their conventionality, uncertainty, to some extent, nebula, these shows widen the range of potential interpretations, so they can target a flexible and fragmented audience.

Extensive evidence indicates that fruit and vegetable (F+V) consumption leads to reduced chances of diet related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). However, the F+V consumption levels remain low. This paper investigates the extent to which access to information technologies improves F+V consumption in South Africa. A nationally representative sample of 20,908 households was analysed using the Poisson and logit regression models. The study results indicated that most households do not consume sufficient F+V per day. Only 26% of the household heads consumed F+V at least five times a day. Access to mobile phones, radio, television, and internet was associated with increasing frequency of F+V consumption, and higher chances that a household would consume the minimum recommended levels. The association between the communication technologies and F+V consumption varied. Television access had the highest association with both foods, while internet was only significantly associated with vegetable consumption. Several demographic and socio-economic factors played a key role in shaping F+V consumption patterns. The results show that there is scope to disseminate nutrition awareness and education programs, through mobile phones, internet, radio and television in South Africa. The interventions to promote F+V consumption should be tailored according to the different socio-economic profiles of the population.

The role of Campus Television (TV) in a university can integrate human resources and audio visual laboratory facilities in each faculty, especially to face today’s digital communication era. The objectives of this study were: (1) to determine the academic community's needs for Campus Television media in Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta (UNY) based on faculties, and the academicians status and (2) to map program types broadcasted by the Campus TV in UNY that were expected by UNY academic community. A survey to the academic community in UNY (consisted of lecturers, employees, and students) was conducted as the research method. Electronic-based questionnaires and smartphones with Google form applications were used as the technique in the data collection. The research subjects were 409 respondents. The data analysis technique was descriptive quantitative. This study concluded that (1) lecturer who agreed and doubted about the existence of Campus TV in UNY were 97.33%, and 2.66% respectively; (2) Employees who agreed was 100%; and (3) Students who agreed, doubted, and disagreed about the existence of Campus TV in UNY were 92.63%, 6.31%, and 1.02% respectively. Campus TV broadcasting programs required by the academic community in UNY included: (1) innovative work programs, (2) campus information, (3) campus activity programs (community service, teaching practice, conference), (4) talk show and (5) skills program. This study provided encouragement to academic community of UNY to support the realization of Campus TV as the integrated laboratory for learning technology.

Real-time VOD (Video on Demand) system is composed of a front-end processing system, a transmission networks, and a client. This paper focuses on the client software implement. It uses household STB (Set Top Box) with Hass hi3110e development platform, RTSP network protocol, and cable to control information, audio and video data transmission. The user client can start a request through cable television networks to achieve selection, storage, and playback the favorite programs anytime and anywhere.

The phenomenon of the television industry that is focused on rating, sharing, and advertising makes television programs more focused on entertainment programs rather than educational programs. The audience groups of television are mostly housewives who stay more at home and they are as a key figure in the education of children in the family. Strengthening the literacy media in Tegalrejo becomes important as the demographic condition shows that mostly the household mothers have low education levels, heterogeneous, and relatively poor. They spend more time watching television without attempting to criticize the content of the program. Moreover, the impressions and attitudes of the housewife are heavily influenced by the frequency of watching television. Therefore, we need to strengthen their literacy media to prevent the negative effect of television and to shape the audience to be more critical and smarter in watching the television. This research uses community-based research (CBR), which actively involves the community. The implementation of strategy in media literacy training begins with the activities of related studies to gain a better understanding about the media literacy, the position and role of housewives in observing and selecting media content through seminars and workshops, pre- and post-test about media literacy. Furthermore, learn the discourse from various groups of societies related to their views and opinions on media literacy movement. After a series of activities have been completed, it was found the testimonies from participants about the broadcasting picture in Indonesia and an image, message, and their expectations for the improvement of broadcasting in Indonesia.[Fenomena industri televisi yang fokus pada rating, share dan advertising membuat program televisi lebih fokus pada program hiburan dan mengesampingkan program edukasi. Kelompok pemirsa televisi dari kalangan ibu rumah tangga tinggal lebih lama di rumah dan mereka adalah tokoh sentral dalam pendidikan anak-anak dalam keluarga. Penguatan media literasi di Tegalrejo menjadi penting karena kondisi demografi di daerah tersebut berpendidikan rendah, heterogen dan relatif miskin. Mereka menghabiskan lebih banyak waktu di depan televisi, menonton televisi di rumah tanpa ada usaha untuk mengkritik konten tayangan acara televisi dan sikap yang tampak pada ibu rumah tangga sangat dipengaruhi oleh jumlah frekuensi mereka menonton tayangan televisi sehingga perlu penguatan literasi televisi guna melawan dampak negative televisi dan mewujudkan penonton yang cerdas, kritis dalam menonton acara televisi. Penelitian ini merupakan bentuk penelitian yang melibatkan peran serta komunitas (Community Base Research). Strategi implementasi pelatihan literasi media diawali dengan kegiatan studi terkait untuk memahami literasi media, posisi dan peran ibu rumah tangga dalam melihat dan memilih konten media melalui seminar dan workshop, pra dan post-test tentang literasi media. Selanjutnya, wacana dari berbagai kalangan masyarakat terkait pemikiran mereka terhadap gerakan literasi media. Setelah serangkaian kegiatan selesai, ditemukan kesaksian dari peserta tentang gambaran penyiaran di Indonesia dan sebuah citra, pesan dan harapan mereka untuk penyempurnaan penyiaran di Indonesia.]

Maternal and child health issues continue to be at the forefront of national and global health policies. Notwithstanding the national and global policy initiatives, maternal mortality continues to be on the ascendancy in developing countries. This paper investigates the determinants of institutional delivery among a cross section of Bangladeshi women. For appropriate policy targeting, it is imperative to investigate the factors that promote institutional delivery and those that retard it. Using discrete choice model, and controlling for other covariates, we found that, women from the richest income quintile, and those that have access to health information via television delivered at appropriate health institutions. Besides, place of residence, mother’s education, wanted pregnancy, utilization of antenatal care services and number of health worker’s visiting time inter alia were found to be significant predictors of the demand for institutional and supervised delivery. The policy implication of this finding is that health education via television is more effective than print media. Secondly, government policies meant to create jobs and increase income levels are envisaged as proper policy instrument to induce the utilization of appropriate health services including institutional delivery. Thirdly, information, education and communication (IEC) programs are urgently needed to inform women about the cause and potential risk of maternal health complications as well as the significance of institutional delivery. Finally, the use of health inputs such as antenatal care during pregnancy should be encouraged.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/dujs.v60i1.10337 Dhaka Univ. J. Sci. 60(1): 53-59 2012 (January)

Purpose This study aims to uncover in-depth examples of how emergent media affects parents’ views and socialization efforts. The study examines these views and efforts in the context of violent commercials. Design/methodology/approach The authors collected data for this paper using two studies. In Study 1, they collected data from the internet. Comments related to “violent ads” or “violent commercials” were collated and analyzed. For Study 2, they conducted in-depth interviews with mothers on their views on parental mediation and impact of media on their children. Findings The internet data helped develop a parental definition of violent ads and identify that parents lie on a continuum regarding their concerns about violent commercials. Further in-depth questioning of parents on the above finding led to the identification of four clusters of parents. “Media managers” attempt to control and restrict their child’s media environment while educating their child about the effects of violent commercials. “Enablers” spend abundant time co-viewing primetime TV while engaging their child in conversations on violence, but not on violent ads. To maintain harmony in the household, “Harmonizers” merely restrict viewing of violent commercials without educating their child about its effects. Finally, “Agent evaluators” are likely to co-view violent commercials, without discussing them with their child. Research limitations/implications First, several of the parental segments (media managers, enablers and harmonizers) tend to note some concerns with violence in advertising. Importantly, this concern for violence appears to be limited to gore and use of physical weapon. Second, while parents do not have homogenous views on violent ads, those who are concerned also have differing roots of concern. This influences their mediation efforts. Third, socialization is bi-directional at times. Practical implications Many parents do not approve are the use of physical violence, use of weapons and depiction of blood/gore even in ads for movies or videogames. Advertisers might be wise to avoid such content in ads directed to children. Second, if media and marketing managers could plan to sponsor TV shows (vs placing violent ads) that offer ad-free program time, parents might respond positively. Third, as socialization is bi-directional, advertisers could consider using ad scenarios where parents and children engage with the pros and cons of a certain product or content, thus enabling parent-child conversations to make an informed decision. Social implications Many parents notice violence in ads; policymakers could consider developing ratings for ads that consider the amount and type of violence while rating an ad. Second, a focus on increasing parental awareness on the harms of constantly exposing children to violent commercials might change the views of some parents who currently believe that a few or no violent commercials are being aired during children’s programs. Finally, parents envisage a greater role for media in their lives, and policymakers will have to suggest ways to effectively integrate media content in one’s lives rather than just suggest bans or restrictions. Originality/value The contributions of this paper include viewers’ (vs researchers’) definition of violent commercials, showcasing that parents are likely to manage media using new media options such as Netflix, and some parents are likely to co-create rules with their children.

Quantitative models in marketing typically focus on the household as the unit of analysis while ignoring the individual family members' behavior and behavioral interactions among household members. However, knowledge of such intra-household behavioral interaction enables marketers to target their communications more effectively. In this paper, the author proposes a modeling framework to capture the intra-household behavioral interaction based on family members' actual consumption behavior over time. The author develops a model to capture multiple agents' simultaneous choice decisions over more than two choice alternatives. This is extremely difficult with other previously developed modeling approaches. We apply the proposed model to a context of family member's television viewing, and simultaneously model whether TV is on, which type of programs is playing and which family member(s) is (are) watching. The proposed model allows us to estimate the individual's intrinsic preference and the extrinsic preference from a joint consumption with other members. These estimates allow us to test several alternative group decision-making heuristics that may operate in those joint consumption occasions and conduct managerially useful counterfactual simulations.

The goal of this systematic review was to evaluate whether children living in single-parent households have a higher risk of obesity. Of the 539 studies identified using keywords, a total of 10 original studies met the inclusion criteria for this review. The outcome measures included objective assessment of adiposity (weight or body mass index (BMI)), dietary consumption, physical activity, and/or obesogenic behaviors (bedroom television, elevated television viewing time, insufficient physical activity, and infrequent family meals). Overall, the studies found higher BMIs and obesogenic behaviors in children of single-parent households. Characteristics identified with this association is comprised of being most prevalent among girls and Black children. Possible explanations for this association include single-parent households having higher time demands due to the lack of shared household responsibilities. Subsequently, a reduction of homemade meals, shared family meals, and physical activity can occur. Also, lower incomes and higher instability related to living transitions may be other possible challenges experienced in single-parent households. Based on the limited number of studies found, further research of the obesity risk in children from single-parent families is recommended. The findings can help provide clinicians and public health programs with a better understanding of how to effectively target family-based interventions for this population.

Korean public broadcasters are reconstructing local fatherhood through two popular reality–variety shows Dad! Where Are We Going? (MBC, 2013–2015) and The Return of Superman (KBS, 2013–) wherein celebrity dads look after their children for 2 days without the help of their wives. The shows exemplify Korean ‘telemodernity’, which describes Asia’s aspirational modernity channeled through lifestyle television programs. These examples of Korean telemodernity strive toward a Western exemplary of fatherhood by breaking from the earlier generation’s paternity, described through an internalized orientalist self-perception as emotionally unavailable. The paternal masculinity that these shows idealize is visible through the mise-en-scene that frames scenarios around the female (mother’s) gaze of approval or disapproval. In a nation panicked by low childbirths, these shows are biopolitical in their design to encourage heteronormative coupling and reproduction among women more so than promote household egalitarianism.

The aim of this study was to describe the main perceived barriers to engagement in leisure-time physical activity and associated factors among adults from the Ermelino Matarazzo district, Sao Paulo, Southeast, Brazil. Data were obtained from a population-based household survey conducted in 2007 involving 889 subjects (≥ 18 years). The long version of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire was used to identify physically inactive individuals. Open question about barriers was applied only for people inactive in leisure and content analysis was conducted to categorize the barriers. Descriptive analysis was performed using frequencies. Bivariate associations between the five most frequently reported barriers and sociodemographic variables, reported diagnoses of chronic diseases, nutritional status, working timing, travel time (to work and school), and television watching were determined using the chi-square test. Results showed that the five most prevalent barriers were lack of time (39.7%), lack of desire or motivation (18.4%), dislike exercising (6.3%), have an injury or disease (5.6%), and lack of money (3.6%). The vulnerable groups to lack of time were people married, young and middle aged, and with longer labor journey. Health problems were related by people with hypertension, diabetes, heart diseases, elderly, with low education and who did not have labor activities. People who were not working, with low education and income, and with hypertension related more dislike of exercising. Lack of desire or motivation was most cited among people who watched television. These results are important to support community programs promoting leisure-time physical activity in areas with low socioeconomic status.

AbstractResidential household owners were surveyed in two different New Hampshire communities that varied in terms of population size, degree of rurality, and per capita income, each with no activities in land application of biosolids. Logit models were developed and logistic regression analyses were carried out for each community. The empirical results suggest that the perception by residents of the potential economic benefits and negative impacts from land application of biosolids can be very influential in achieving public acceptance. From a policymaker's viewpoint, this suggests the need for sound educational programs that explicitly describe the economic benefits, negative impacts, and potential risks that typically occur with land application of biosolids. Supportive studies are needed to complement the educational programs. These measures will allow residents to weigh the relative benefits and costs to determine their positions on this approach to management of biosolids and to discount emotional judgements and misinformation. The media needs to ensure that newspaper, magazine, and television reports are accurate and taken from reliable sources. Survey results suggest that the less volume of information presented by the media, the more supportive residents are of land application. Therefore, with such sensitivity by respondents to quantity of information, it is imperative that media outlets place high priority on the quality and accuracy of materials presented. Socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents did not influence attitudes toward acceptance or rejection of biosolids application, thus eliminating the difficulty that social stratification could cause in achieving acceptance.

<p><em>Corporate social responsibility has become a global issue in the community and the company. CSR programs implemented by PT Pertamina (Persero) Region IV Regional Central Java and Yogyakarta in the areas of Education, Health, Environmental Conservation, Community Empowerment has been right on target. Corporate Social Responsibility program targeted, among others, so that more people know and use products - products Pertamina, as well as for good imaging Pertamina eyes of society. The communication strategy to the public (external strategies) used in the dissemination using print media such as newspapers and magazines nationally and locally. Electronic media using television and radio in Central Java and Yogyakarta as well as nationally. Communication strategies used in the dissemination to all employees of Pertamina, the media used in the form of intranet Pertamina, Energia magazine and TV Display. Theoretical basis used in this study is adopted from (Kottler, 2005) which states social initiatives of companies that can be taken for the implementation of CSR there are six forms of Cause Promotion, Cause Related Marketing, Corporate Social Marketing, Corporate Philanthropy, Community Volunteering and Socially Responsible Business Practices. The question in this research is how the Communication Strategy Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to PT Pertamina (Persero) Region IV Regional Central Java and Yogyakarta.</em><em></em></p>

The article investigates that the prosecutor’s office should carry out information activities in order to implement the principle of publicity, protection and protection of human rights and freedoms, and the interests of the state. It is substantiated that the forms of interaction of the prosecutor’s office with the media (hereinafter – the media) are: a press conference, placement of materials in the media; briefing; distribution of press releases; interview; Round Table; press tour; placing information materials on the website; performances by employees on television broadcasts and radio programs; placement of information materials in new media; inviting media representatives to a meeting. It was determined that the prosecutor’s office should have a high level of professionalism, which in turn would facilitate the correct and justified formulation of the answers to the questions posed by journalists and other media representatives. In particular, the article emphasizes the relevance of the investigation of criminal offenses involving the media. Has actuality of placement of materials in mass media. Important information allows to increase the level of legal culture of the population, to establish partnerships with the institutions of civil society. It is established that the basis of criminal responsibility is the commission of a person with a dangerous act that contains a crime. It includes: object, objective side, subject, subjective side. The absence of one of these elements does not constitute a criminal offense. Key words: forms of interaction, Prosecutor General’s Office, mass media, journalists, publicity, human rights, crime.

Abstract Studies in developed countries indicate that social activities can make a difference in mental health in later life. Yet, research on potential benefits of social activities for older adults in developing countries, including Mexico, has been scarce. This study uses the two most recent waves (2012, 2015) of the Mexican Health and Aging Study to investigate the impact of social activities on depressive symptoms among older men (n = 4, 749) and women (n = 6,527), aged 50+, in Mexico. The results of Ordinary Least Squares regressions indicate that it is important to differentiate among specific social activities in later life. Particularly, not only group-based but also solitary social activities were predictive of better mental health. Moreover, the findings demonstrate several gender differences and similarities. Participation in clubs, communication with relatives and friends, physical exercise, and watching television were beneficial for mental health among men, whereas volunteering, playing games, and making crafts were associated with fewer depressive symptoms among women. At the same time, reading as well as doing household chores were related to better mental health among older Mexicans, regardless of gender. Furthermore, this study shows that self-reported health, functional limitations, chronic conditions, and frequent pain might shape the implications of social activities for depressive symptoms among older adults in Mexico. The insights from this study can be helpful for intervention programs that are being developed to promote benefits of group-based and solitary social activities for mental health among older men and women with different levels of physical health.

<p><em>In order to understand the full image concerning activity of regional TV channels we used the comparative analysis method. Due to its components such as analogy, analysis and composition, </em><em>comparing separate events and processes (in order to conduct its quality and quantity characteristics) we reached the possibility to identify similarities and differences in approaches, management, styles of TV channels in Odesa region, Poltava region, Sumy region and Chernivtsi region. Taking as a basis a fact that absolutely different issues are to be compared, subjects of research are TV channels both similar, and different according to its technical capacities, resource capabilities such as city and regional level TV channels.</em></p><p class="s4"><em>We concluded that regional television channels, which, in turn, differ in the number of employees, transmitter power, coverage radius of the broadcast signal, etc., to considerable extent lack of genre diversity, the breadth of themes. The reasons for this are, on the one hand, in insufficient financial and economic opportunities, and on the other hand, in the absence of creativity, unwillingness to change something in their work. In addition, as the study shows, not in all cases the decisive factors here are the scale of the channel, the number of employees, and the level of resource support.</em></p><p><em>Regional television channels and regional media as a whole are currently functioning in conditions of incredible competition in the market for information influence, a substantial increase in content, thematic offerings at times, in conditions of expanding communication platforms and the source database. Thematic content of the news, their genre diversity are peculiar markers in the work of regional TV channels. Scientists in Ukraine and abroad continue to research on these issues. According to significance of reserves identification in news editors office, we also consider the researches of regional media is still needed. Research novelty consists in comparison of certain directions both similar and different on its organizational framework, </em><em>coverage radius of the broadcast signal.</em><em></em></p><p><em>Small TV channels on city level as a rule are not involved into nationwide monitoring, conducted by non-governmental media organizations. They do not conduct its own monitoring and researches. Obtained results, conclusions and recommendations can be used for introduction of alternations in working process by TV- and radio companies, more specifically by editors office of informative programs.</em></p><p class="s4"><strong><em>Key words: </em></strong><em>news, typesetting, video messages, plot, audience, synchronization, TV presenter.</em></p>

This study assessed the productivity and technical efficiency variability among small-holder cotton farmers in Bunda district, Tanzania. The efficiency analysis results have shown that the scores of technical efficiency sample of contract farmers varied from 1.75% to 87.07%, with an average of 46.05%. The implication of this is that there existed considerable technical deficiency in cotton farming. That is to say, usually, small-holder cotton contract farmers in the investigation region incurred loss of about 53.95% in outputs as a result of technical deficiency. The sources of inefficiency for contract farmers were experience of contract farmers, gender of household head and owning Television (TV)On the other hand, non-contract small-holder farmers’ technical efficiencies varied from 3.94% to 82.05%, having a mean of 46.79%. Usually, small-holder non-contract farmers in the investigation region incurred loss of about 53.21% in outputs as result of technical deficiency. The implication of this is that output average can be raised by at least 53.21% through the application of resources available as well as the given technology if the deficiency factors are addressed fully. The source of inefficiency for non-contract farmers is owning TV.It is recommended that young farmers need to be encouraged to join contract farming in order to get high productivity, more female headed households should be encouraged to participate in contract farming, both contract and non-contract farmers should watch TV programs which are educative and can assist them gain farm management knowledge for high productivity and lastly, ginners are required to provide more services in exchange of exclusive purchasing rights as agreed when signing contracts.

In spite of various effective intervention programs, the under-5 child mortality rate (U5MR) is still high in Bangladesh. The present paper focused on the levels, trends and determinants of U5MR in Bangladesh utilizing data from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS), 2007. Differential pattern in U5MR in Bangladesh was examined using life table technique as a bi-variate analysis and Cox proportional hazard model was used to analyze the determinants of U5MR mortality. Data from BDHS (2007) showed that U5MR during the five years preceding the survey was 65 per 1,000 live births, i.e. one in fifteen children born in Bangladesh died before reaching the fifth birthday. The risk of dying in the first month of life (37 per 1,000) was nearly two and a half times greater than in the subsequent 11 months (15 per 1,000). Deaths in the neonatal period accounted for 57 percent of all under-five deaths. In the Cox proportional hazard model analysis, factors such as the place of residence, parent’s education, father’s working status, sources of drinking water, type of toilet facility, wealth status, watching of television, mother’s age, months of breastfeeding, birth interval had significant influence on infant and child mortality. The most significant predictors of neonatal, post-neonatal, infant and child mortality were residence, parent’s education, type of toilet facility, wealth status, watching TV, months of breastfeeding, and birth interval. Despite the improvement of medical technology, child mortality remained alarmingly high, indicating that demographic, socioeconomic, household and environmental conditions must be improved to substantially reduce child mortality in this population. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/bjms.v13i4.20590 Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol.13(4) 2014 p.431-437

e12561 Background: Nearly 70% of the 7.6 million cancer deaths occur annually in developing countries like Tanzania, with breast cancer being among the most common causes of cancer mortality. Although data are incomplete, late-stage disease is believed to limit breast cancer control in Tanzania, with delayed diagnosis linked to low levels of breast cancer awareness among women. The goal of this study was to explore awareness of this disease among low-income women accessing routine medical care from three district hospitals in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Methods: This survey-based study examined participants' knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs regarding breast cancer causes, risk factors, symptoms, early detection measures, treatment, and preferred education sources. Sociodemographic variations in knowledge of breast cancer risk factors, symptoms, and treatments were assessed. Results: Two hundred and twenty-five women, ages 18-55 years, participated. Over half (52%) reported a primary school education or less; 69.9% were married; 26.2% were unemployed. The average monthly household income was just below the Dar es Salaam mean. Ninety-eight percent were aware of breast cancer; 22% knew someone with a history of breast cancer. Among the 126 women who heard of breast self exam, 25% and 34% practiced it regularly and occasionally, respectively; 41% never practiced it. Only 6.2% had regular clinical breast exams. A minority knew of mammography (32%); <2% had undergone a mammogram. Of the items listed, respondents correctly identified symptoms (51%), risk factors (31%), and treatments (51%). Data reflecting sociodemographic variations in knowledge will be shown. Preferred sources of breast cancer educational materials included group sessions, television or radio programs, and meetings with breast cancer survivors. Conclusions: This work provides valuable insight into preferred sources of breast cancer education among Tanzanian women.

Background. Iodine deficiency is a global public health concern as it leads to inadequate production of thyroid hormone in the body, causing too many destructive consequences on the roles and functions of different human organs and muscles including brain growth and can manifest into many damaging effects such as intestinal cerebral impedance, cancer of intestine, breast disorders, and physical deformities like goitre and cretinism to one’s body. Despite all these negative effects, there are several important public health programs including universal salt iodization (USI) to improve on households’ iodine intake, notwithstanding this, countless families are still eating foods containing less iodine or no iodine at all. Hence, this study examined the intake of iodized salt after years of universal salt iodization and the knowledge on iodized salt among households in the Sissala East Municipality. Method. A descriptive cross-sectional study was adopted to collect data for the study. Data were collected from women in charge of household meal preparation using a semistructured questionnaire and rapid field iodine test kits. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20 was used for the data analysis and presented in tables and graphs. p value <0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Findings. Only 41.4% of the households have good knowledge on benefits of iodized salt and dangers associated with iodine deficiency. It was realized that the health workers (46.6%) and television were the main sources of information on iodized salt. Household salt usage with adequate (>15 ppm) levels of iodine was 44.0%; however 85.9% of the salts were stored in covered containers. The study showed significant associations between knowledge on iodized salt and educational level (p≤0.001), occupation (p=0.043), religion (p=0.027), and ethnic lineage (p=0.046). Also, the use of iodized salt showed associations with the educational level (p≤0.001), occupation (p=0.003), religion (p=0.042), and knowledge on iodized salt (p≤0.001). Conclusions. Only about 4 in 10 households were consuming salt with adequate iodine, and this coverage is very low compared with the 90% or more coverage recommended by WHO/UNICEF/ICCIDD. Having secondary and tertiary education and having good knowledge of iodized salt has a great influence on the use of iodized salt; however, with this low level of knowledge of importance of iodized salt among women responsible for house food preparations, there is the need for health professionals to intensify education and promotion on iodized salt in the area and to monitor and verify iodine content of salts produced and sold in the market all times, as the source of the salt might have contributed to the low levels of iodine in the household salt.

AbstractBackground:In recent years, the perceived threat of chemical terrorism has increased. It is hoped that teaching civilians how to behave during a chemical incident will decrease the number of “worried well” patients at hospitals, reduce secondary contamination, and increase compliance with the instructions of emergency services. The governments of the United Kingdom and Israel sent booklets to every household in their respective countries. In Israel, the civilian population was issued chemical personal protective equipment (chemical personal protective equipment).Methods:The effectiveness of these public education programs was assessed using a scenario-based questionnaire that was distributed to 100 respondents in Birmingham, UK and Jerusalem, Israel. Respondents were asked how they would behave in three deliberate chemical release scenarios and how they would seek information and help.Results:Only 33% of the UK respondents and 22% of the Israeli respondents recalled reading the government booklets. When asked what they would do after being contaminated in a deliberate release, approximately half of the respondents ranked seeking medical care at a hospital as the most appropriate action.The preferred sources of information in the wake of a chemical strike were (in descending order): radio, television, and the Internet. Approximately half of the respondents would call emergency services for information. Forty-one percent of the UK respondents and 33% of Israeli respondents stated that they either would call or go to the nearest hospital to seek information.Conclusions:The public information campaigns in both countries have had a limited impact. Many citizens claimed they would self-present to the nearest hospital following a chemical attack rather than waiting for the emergency services. A similar response was witnessed in the Sarin attacks in Tokyo and the 1991 Scud missile attacks in Israel.Current UK doctrine mandates that specialist decontamination teams be deployed to the scene of a chemical release. However, this takes >1 hour, and it requires at least 30 minutes to don hospital chemical personal protective equipment. Therefore, it is imperative that hospitals are equipped to cope with unannounced self-presenters after a chemical attack. This requires chemical personal protective equipment and protocols that are easier to use.

Research background. During these days the innovations are a more and more used definition in the business, especially in the market research, human resource management, new products and service development, etc. Frequently innovations are related with the application of new technology and new ideas as well as creation of new methods. Even more, innovations are related with the development of existing processes and products (Bigliardi, Dormio, 2009). Innovations are important in the sector of tourism industry, which is expanding every time combining more and more different areas of business. According to Melnikas (2011), discontent and necessity of changes are some persuasive factors to begin an activity of innovation. Thus, it could be the reason for the application of innovations in the sector of accommodation service to become essential. Importance of innovations is discussed pretty widely in the scientific literature (Bigliardi, Dormio, 2009; Hall, Williams, 2008; Inauen, Schenker-Wicki, 2011; Notaro et al., 2012), but innovations in tourism sector have been discussed only recently (Nagy, 2012; Ravar, Iorgulescu, 2013). This article is relevant because application of innovations in the sector of accommodation service is not enough discussed in Lithuania as it is done by some foreign scientists (Sundbo et al., 2007; Hall et al., 2008; Ravar, Iorgulescu, 2013). The object of the research is innovations in the sector of accommodation service, and the aim is to determine the activeness of innovations’ application in the sector of an accommodation service. Research methods. This article deals with the application of innovations in the sector of accommodation service using the method of scientific literature analyses and quantitative empirical research – the method questionnaire survey. The research respondents were the employees of Kaunas city organizations of accommodation service. The author of this article is grateful to her student Martynas Bruzas who collected 270 filled in questionnaires. Results and discussion. Innovations are the most frequently described as an application of technologies creating new products, new services, and new processes of activity in the market. Innovations are combined with technological changes in the products, services and their creation processes. The research results revealed that services of accommodation business were restricted by just using electronic mail, the electronic page of business and electronic page of socialization. The research results revealed that services of accommodation business performed just slight changes of innovations according to some novelties in the market. On the other hand, employees of these organizations were enough sure that their organizations were applying innovations, but at the same time they thought that innovations could be more combined with the qualifications of organizations’ employees. Conclusions. According to research results, we suggest that most Kaunas city accommodation services presume that they are active in the application of innovations, but there were only some technological changes of innovations. The research results revealed that usually innovations were related to IT programs of accommodation service, wireless internet, telephone, television, touch tabs, room infrastructure and the systems of reservations. Keywords: innovations, innovations of accommodation sector, development.

Purpose This study provided a unique opportunity to analyze five generations of a small but continually evolving family-owned media organization with multiple media outlets operating across delivery platforms. The purpose of this paper is to identify variables that contributed to entrepreneurship and sustainability, holding the family business intact for more than 100 years. Design/methodology/approach This study used organizational ecology in a qualitative case study to interview entrepreneurs from three of five generations. Additionally, current employees, family and friends, along with letters, cards, published articles and financial data were included in the analysis. Entrepreneurial themes based on organizational ecology were identified including variation, selection, retention, as well as values, innovation, service and adaptability. Findings The company in this study began with the purchase of newspapers and start-up of a news service in 1904. By the third generation, entrepreneurial initiatives included additional newspapers, as well as a television start-up. In the fourth and fifth generations, the company evolved into what the family termed a “media development company” with a mix of revenue platforms including electronic newspapers, websites, radio stations, live events and syndicated programs. Research limitations/implications Limitations included sample size and focus on the perspectives of family members. More research is needed to identify the struggles within the family media firm and the more troubling aspects of a family company as indicated in the literature and their possible downside to both employees and family members who work for the short term or long haul in smaller, family-owned companies. Practical implications Sustainability of family-owned media organizations occurred through a balance of entrepreneurial activities and family values. Revenue flows resulted from adapting business models from selling advertising in local newspapers to providing funding and other support to local businesses gaining footholds. Market innovation, risk and community-minded solutions resulted in survival through stages of variation, selection and retention. Social implications For family media companies to thrive, entrepreneurship and adaptability are key. Significant contributions to theory from this study indicated organizational ecology is a useful tool in analyzing the evolution of a media company through stages of variation, selection and retention. After almost 80 years of operation in the retention stage, the company started over in the variation stage with new products including radio, internet, live events and community business ventures. Timely diversification was key as media and community landscapes changed. Originality/value Unique findings indicated sustainability came through a family-oriented approach to business that carried on throughout generations: a long-term view with a commitment to family values, the promotion of entrepreneurial opportunities for family and non-family members and an external focus as media development companies on the success of local businesses and communities in which they operated.

Purpose: The communication by pharmaceutical companies of promotional messages about their products has long been controversial, but deemed to be necessary by the pharmaceutical industry so that health care professionals and in some cases patients/consumers can be made aware of the latest developments through the communication vehicles they are accustomed to seeing – in the case of health care professionals, through medical advertising, direct mail, visits by company representatives, and attendance at medical meetings, and in case of patients, through the news media and television advertising. On the other hand, critics argue that such promotion, which sometimes reduces complex medical issues to advertising slogans, is inappropriate for products intended to treat and cure diseases, and that health care professionals should learn about new products from peer-reviewed medical literature. Consequently, advertising, and promotional programs are heavily regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, the laws themselves raise constitutional issues of infringement on free speech. Over the past few years, a number of lawsuits have been decided that help clarify the role of the FDA and the extent of its authority in regulating what companies or their employees say about their products. These court decisions are important because they help define how health care professionals and patients/consumers receive medical information. Methods: This overview is intended to identify, in non-technical language, some of the more controversial and challenging issues involved in the FDA’s efforts to regulate marketing communications by drug companies and how the courts view them. Results: The recent lawsuits often involve complex and far-reaching legal issues. But when examined in toto, as this paper does, they have reflected a view by the courts that truthful and non-misleading statements by drug companies about their products can be legally communicated even when the medical information is not formally approved by the FDA and included in the FDA-approved labeling. The lawsuits thus have led to an environment in which the FDA continues to oversee with great fervor the activities of drug companies in communicating medical information but at the same time having some flexibility in keeping health care professionals and patients up to date with th latest information about medical research and new therapeutic products. Conclusion: How pharmaceutical products are marketed has been deemed by the U.S. Congress to be important enough to need to be subject to federal regulation. The issues create a tension between the need for medical information to be accurate and balanced, and the guarantees of free speech. This review provides an important perspective on how this tension is being resolved, even as dramatic advances in both medical products and technology create new challenges.

Background:2020 year has become a landmark for the medical care system around the world. A huge number of patients and doctors were involved in the fight against an unknown and rapidly spreading infection, while many patients with chronic diseases or those who were just planning to see a doctor were left without this opportunity. The consequence was the active development of the online format of patient-doctor communication.Objectives:To determine the value of conducting schools for patients with rheumatologic diseases or related complaints in a pandemic.Methods:On the basis of the Clinical Rheumatology Center of the Medical Association “New Hospital”, online schools were organized for patients with rheumatological diseases and complaints. In just 3 months, 6 schools were held, in which 299 people took part. At the end of each session, patients were asked to answer questions about the level of satisfaction and the value of the information received. The survey was conducted in Google form.Results:about 80% of the responders lived in the region where the schools were held, 20% were from other regions of Russia or other countries. One third of patients (33.9%) were 31-40 years old, a quarter (25%) were 51-60 years old, and every fifth (19.6) was from 61 to 70 years old. The overwhelming majority (61.1%) learned about the training from employees’ announcements or on the website of a medical organization. Interestingly, almost a third of the participants (31.9%) listened to the lecture to “prevent problems in the future” or “for general development,” the rest either get sick themselves or have relatives with these problems. The significance and usefulness of the school on a scale from 0 to 10 points was assessed by 75% participants at 10 points, another 21% from 7 to 9 points, and for 1 participant - by 3 and 4 points. When answering the question: “Will something change in the understanding of your disease or further managing after today’s lesson?” most of the listeners answered that “they are planning to change their lifestyle” (55.4%), a little less - “understands that you need to come to an in-person appointment” (27.4%), “listened due to problems with relatives” (30.4%) and “understands that it is necessary to adjust the treatment” (23.2%). 87.5% of the responders rated the degree of interest with which the teacher led the school at 10 points; all 100% of participants expressed a desire to attend the following events. When comparing the school with television programs or other similar events, 83.9% of people noted a higher level of information importance and 87.5% of accessibility of its presentation. All responders with a high probability were ready to recommend schools to another people (85.7% for 10 points), trust the doctor conducting such schools (94.6% for 10 points) and would turn to this doctor if possible (87.5% for 10 points). Also, all participants actively answered the question about the desired topic of future schools.Conclusion:the conducted evaluation of the online format of schools for patients with rheumatic diseases or complaints has confirmed the high satisfaction of patients with this form of communication, the presence of a certain “request” for such format, clarity and accessibility of the transmitted information. The most important result of the training can be considered the readiness of patients to change their lifestyle and the understanding that it is necessary to observe or consult a doctor.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

This study aimed to explore the perceived barriers to physical activity among college students Study Design: Qualitative research design Eight focus group discussions on 67 college students aged 18-24 years (48 females, 19 males) was conducted on College premises. Data were analysed using inductive approach. Participants identified a number of obstacles to physical activity. Perceived barriers emerged from the analysis of the data addressed the different dimensions of the socio-ecological framework. The result indicated that the young adults perceived substantial amount of personal, social and environmental factors as barriers such as time constraint, tiredness, stress, family control, safety issues and much more. Understanding the barriers and overcoming the barriers at this stage will be valuable. Health professionals and researchers can use this information to design and implement interventions, strategies and policies to promote the participation in physical activity. This further can help the students to deal with those barriers and can help to instil the habit of regular physical activity in the later adult years.

The kids in our house are making a public comeback. They are surfacing from the private recesses of the house out into the more communal space of the family lounge room. After years of being holed-up in their bedrooms they are back – thanks to pay TV. Foxtel has presented them with a smorgasbord of programs, tempting enough to entice even the most die-hard gamer or teenage recluse out of the bedroom and into the throes of lounge room politics. In some ways, our newly populated lounge room is reminiscent of David Morley’s Family Television with television viewing “situated firmly within the politics of the living room”(19). This article explores the notion that the introduction of pay TV in Australia challenges the general movement towards an individualisation of media consumption in the family home. Due to pay TV’s limitations of one outlet per household, children and teenagers are leaving the privacies of their own bedrooms and returning to the family lounge room. With this return, many family members are having to relearn the art of sharing (or getting your fair share of) this limited resource. This situation may also be a particularly Australian one, as it seems that pay TV with its multi-channel viewing is more readily available on multiple television sets within homes in other countries (Tidhar, Chava and Nossek 16) Family television viewing seems to be part of a relatively recent (round the hearth) tradition, which followed from the family piano, phonograph and the radio. These traditions re-established the home and family as a place where parental authority overrode the dangers of the outside world. Radio broadcasters in the 1940s endorsed the family radio as a way to promote family togetherness because (as they saw it) “the house and hearth have [had] been largely given up in favour of a multitude of other interests and activities outside, with the consequent disintegration of family ties and affections” (Lewis qtd. in Flichy 158). Television viewing followed suit as another round-the-hearth family tradition during the earlier period of domestic television. David Morley (1986) explored the domestic consumption of television in the context of everyday family life during this time, a time when only one television set was available to most families – a time when dads, and the occasional mum, ruled the television viewing habits of the family. Morley’s approach to television viewing was one in which the household (or family) was central to interpreting the television audience; where there were gendered regimes of watching and program choice which often reflected existing power relationships in the home. Today most Australian families have more than one television set (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), leading the way to more individualised and fragmented modes of television watching within Australian homes. The introduction of computers, the Internet and video consoles in many family homes seems to have further dispersed family members to more private spaces in the family home, diffusing existing conflict surrounding the family television. Therefore, "if television once brought the family together around the hearth, now domestic technologies permit the dispersal of family members to different rooms or different activities within the same space" (Livingstone 128). The geographical migration of the television set, along with new digital technologies, to the bedrooms and secondary living spaces in many family homes has brought with it new dynamics for social space within the household and a “reciprocal (re)construction of the meanings and functions of both the technological objects and the domestic spaces they inhabit” (Caron 3). Equipping bedrooms with television and digital technologies has the ability to change the room’s conventional usage – both spatially and temporally. In this way our 11-year-old’s bedroom has been transformed into a specialised bedroom culture – a gamer’s paradise. By locating a television and game console in this bedroom the technologies are identified as personal property while at the same time allowing for a space that functions as both communal and private, for sharing with siblings and friends and solitary gaming. The upside of this general movement towards a separate bedroom culture (or private media spaces) is that there are more spaces to engage with media technologies and therefore more viewing choice for family members. These extra media spaces have freed up the lounge room possibly allowing for more harmony and accord within the family, while at the same time bringing about the opportunity for some family members to retreat from the social togetherness of family television viewing. However, with the limitations of one outlet per household in Australian pay TV, the lounge room has again become the focus of family television viewing in some Australian homes. With over twenty percent of Australian homes now subscribing to pay TV (Australian Film Commission) some Australian families may again be experiencing the togetherness (and the inevitable struggles) of sharing one television set. In the days when one television set was the norm, Morley explored the way in which family viewing habits reflected existing power relationships in the home, focussing mainly on issues concerned with gender and class in the UK home. Twenty years later, in our house on the other side of the world, similar battles are taking place – Dragonball Z vs. Ocean Girl, Robot Wars vs. Buffy and World Series Cricket vs. Changing Rooms. However, unlike Morley’s Family Television the results of these gendered battles are too close to call. Perhaps, with forty or more channels to choose from, and programs designed to appeal to specific family members, the stakes are even higher and the battle has only just begun. Today’s media-rich home environments, with multiple television sets and digital technologies, seem to have gone some way to resolving household conflicts over television viewing allowing for more choice and individualisation of media consumption. However, the introduction of pay TV in Australia has seen a return to the living room politics of family television viewing somewhat reminiscent of Morley’s Family Television where sharing the family television reflected and highlighted existing family power relationships and struggles. Works Cited Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Australia in Brief: Way of Life. Commonwealth of Australia. 2 March 2003 <http://www.dfat.gov.au/aib2001/media.php>. Australian Film Commission. Get the Picture: Fast Facts. 2002. 3 March 2003 <http://www.afc.gov.au/GTP/wptvfast.php>. Caron, Andre. "New Communication Technologies in the Home: A Qualitative Study on the Introduction, Appropriation and Uses of Media in the Family." Young People and the Media. Sydney: International Forum of Researchers, 2000. Livingstone, Sonia. "The Meaning of Domestic Technologies: A Personal Construct Analysis of Familial Gender Relations." Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. Eds. Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch. London: Routledge, 1992. 113-30. Morley, D. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Pleasure. London: Routledge, 1986. Tidhar, Chava E., and Hillel Nossek. "All in the Family: The Integration of a New Media Technology in the Family." Communications 27 (2002): 15-34. Links http://www.afc.gov.au/GTP/wptvfast.htmlhttp://www.dfat.gov.au/aib2001/media.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Holloway, Donell. "Sharing Foxtel" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/06-sharingfoxtel.php>. APA Style Holloway, D. (2003, Apr 23). Sharing Foxtel. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/06-sharingfoxtel.php>

The trust issue occurred toward the former prisoners made it difficult for them to return to society. Based on this issue, an effort was made to counter the stereotypes developed in the community. Unlike other clothing businesses, Residivist Streetwear has a unique concept, which manifested in the design of its products. Residivist Streetwear uses the idea of "Prison Culture" in every designs. Moreover, 99% of its employees are recidivists. With the stigma and discrimination that the ex-prisoners received, it is not easy for Residivist Streetwear to make its brand known and accepted by the community. This article aims to find and to analyze Residivist Streetwear’s branding strategies. The method used in this study is a qualitative method with a case study approach. Based on the research, it was found that Residivist Streetwear’s branding strategies included, (1) increasing brand appeal through product maker’s background, brand name, product hang tag, and the use of product design with the "Prison Culture” concept; (2) communicating brands through endorsement, sales promotion, social media, television, and various events and programs of the Anugerah Insan Residivist Foundation; (3) the use of product design with the concept of “Prison Culture” is a hallmark of Residivist Streetwear in changing the stigma aimed by the community to ex-convicts.

I can remember setting up the dish, all the excitement of assembling it [...] and then putting the motor on. And in the late afternoon, you position the dish and kind of turn it, to find the right spot, and all of a sudden on this blank television screen there was an image that came on. And it was shocking knowing that this noise and this thing would be there, and begin to infiltrate – because I see it as an infiltration, I see it as invasion – I’m not mad on television, very choosy really about what I watch – and I see it as an invasion, and there was GWN as well as the ABC. I just thought ‘by golly, I’m in the process of brain-washing people to accept stuff without thinking about it, like consciously considering either side of any case’ [...] The one thing that protected you from having it on at all times was the need to put on the generator in order to power it. I felt a bit sad actually. (Savannah Kingston, Female, 55+ – name changed – homestead respondent) This paper addresses the huge communications changes that occurred over the past fifty years in outback Western Australia. (What happened in WA also has parallels with equivalent events in the Northern Territory, Queensland, in the larger properties in western New South Wales and northern South Australia.) Although the ‘coming of television’ – associated in remote areas with using a satellite dish to scan for the incoming signal – is typically associated with a major shift in community and cultural life, the evidence suggests that the advent of the telephone had an equivalent or greater impact in remote areas. With the introduction of the telephone, the homestead family no longer had to tune into (or scan) the radio frequencies to check on predicted weather conditions, to respond to emergencies, to engage in roll call or to hold a ‘public meeting’. As the scanning of the radio frequencies ended, so the scanning of the satellite signals began. As Sandstone resident Grant Coleridge (pseudonym, male, 40-54) said, only half ironically, “We got the telephone and the telly at the same time, so civilisation sort of hit altogether actually.” The scale and importance of changes to the technological communications infrastructure in remote WA within a single life-time spans pre-2-way radio to video livestock auctions by satellite. It comes as a surprise to most Australians that these changes have occurred in the past generation. As recent viewers of the unexpectedly-successful Mongolian film The Story of the Weeping Camel (2004) would know, one of the themes of the Oscar-nominated movie is the coming of television and its impact upon a traditional rural life. The comparative availability of television outside the rural areas of Mongolia – and its attraction to, particularly, the younger family members in the Weeping Camel household – is a motif that is explored throughout the narrative, with an unspoken question about the price to be paid for including television in the cultural mix. It’s easy to construct this story as a fable about the ‘exotic other’, but the same theme was played out comparatively recently in remote Western Australia, where the domestic satellite service AUSSAT first made television an affordable option just under twenty years ago. This paper is about the people in remote Western Australia who started scanning for the satellite signal in 1986, and stopped scanning for the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio phone messages at about the same time. Savannah Kingston (name changed), who in 1989 generously agreed to an in-depth interview discussing the impact of satellite broadcasting upon her outback life, was a matriarch on a rural property with four grown children. She had clear views upon ways in which life had changed dramatically in the generation before the satellite allowed the scanning of the television signal. Her recollection of the weft and warp of the tapestry of life in outback WA started thirty-five years previously, with her arrival on the station as a young wife: When I went there [mid-1950s], we had a cook and we ate in the dining room. The cook and anyone who worked in the house ate in the kitchen and the men outside ate in the outside. So, with the progress of labour away from the bush, and the cost of labour becoming [prohibitive] for a lot of people, we got down to having governesses or house-girls. If the house-girls were white, they ate at the table with us and the governesses ate with us. If the house-girls were Aboriginal, they didn’t like eating with us, and they preferred to eat in the kitchen. The kids ate with them. Which wasn’t a good idea because two of my children have good manners and two of them have appalling manners. The availability of domestic help supported a culture of hospitality reminiscent of British between-the-wars country house parties, recreated in Agatha Christie novels and historically-based films such as The Remains of the Day (1993): In those early days, we still had lots of visitors [...] People visited a lot and stayed, so that you had people coming to stay for maybe two or three days, five days, a week, two weeks at a time and that required a lot of organisation. [int:] WHERE DID YOUR VISITORS COME FROM? City, or from the Eastern states, occasionally from overseas. [Int:] WOULD THEY BE RELATIVES? Sometimes relatives, friends or someone passing through who’d been, you know, someone would say ‘do visit’ and they’d say ‘they’d love to see you’. But it was lovely, it was good. It’s a way of learning what’s going on. (Savannah Kingston.) The ‘exotic other’ of the fabled hospitality of station life obscures the fact that visitors from the towns, cities and overseas were a major source of news and information in a society where radio broadcasts were unpredictable and there was no post or newspaper delivery. Visitors were supplemented by a busy calendar of social events that tied together a community of settlements in gymkhanas, cricket fixtures and golf tournaments (on a dirt course). Shifts in the communications environment – the introduction of television and telephone – followed a generation of social change witnessing the metamorphosis of the homestead from the hub of a gentrified lifestyle (with servants, governesses, polo and weekends away) to compact, efficient business-units, usually run by a skeleton staff with labour hired in at the peak times of year. Over the years between the 1960s-1980s isolation became a growing problem. Once Indigenous people won the fight for award-rate wages their (essentially) unpaid labour could no longer support the lifestyle of the station owners and the absence of support staff constrained opportunities for socialising off the property, and entertaining on it, and the communication environment became progressively poorer. Life on the homestead was conceived of as being more fragile than that in the city, and more economically vulnerable to a poor harvest or calamities such as wildfire. The differences wrought by the introduction of newer communication technologies were acknowledged by those in the country, but there was a clear resistance to city-dwellers constructing the changes as an attack upon the romance of the outback lifestyle. When the then Communications Minister Tony Staley suggested in 1979 that a satellite could help “dispel the distance – mental as well as geographical – between urban and regional dwellers, between the haves and the have-nots in a communication society”, he was buying into a discourse of rural life which effectively disempowered those who lived in rural and remote areas. He was also ignoring the reality of a situation where the Australian outback was provided with satellite communication a decade after it was made available to Canadians, and where the king-maker in the story – Kerry Packer – stood to reap a financial windfall. There was a mythological dimension to Australia (finally) having a domestic satellite. Cameron Hazelhurst’s article on ‘The Dawn of the Satellite Era in Australia’ includes a colourful account of Kerry Packer’s explanation to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of the capacity of domestic satellites to bring television, radio and telephone services to isolated communities in arctic Canada: And I [Packer] went and saw the Prime Minister and I explained to him my understanding of what was happening in those areas, and to his undying credit he grasped on to it immediately and said ‘Of course, it’s what we want. It’s exactly the sort of thing we need to stop the drift of people into urban areas. We can keep them informed. We can allow them to participate in whatever’s happening around the nation (Day 7, cited in Hazelhurst). Fraser here, as someone with experience of running a rural property in Victoria, propounds a pro-country rhetoric as a rationale for deployment of the satellite in terms of the Australian national policy agenda. (The desire of Packer to network his television stations and couple efficiency with reach is not addressed in this mythological reconstruction.) It is difficult, sometimes, to appreciate the level of isolation experienced on outback properties at the time. As Bryan Docker (male, 40-54), a resident of Broome at the time of the interviews, commented, “Telegrams, in those days, were the life-blood of the stations, through the Flying Doctor Service. But at certain times of the year the sun spots would interfere with the microwave links and we were still on morse from Broome to Derby during those periods.” Without reliable shortwave radio; with no television, newspapers or telephone; and with the demands of keeping the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio channel open for emergencies visitors were one of the ways in which station-dwellers could maintain an awareness of current events. Even at the time of the interviews, after the start of satellite broadcasting, I never travelled to an outback property without taking recent papers and offering to pick up post. (Many of the stations were over an hour’s journey from their nearest post office.) The RFDS 2-way radio service offered a social-lifeline as well as an emergency communication system: [Int:] DO YOU MISS THE ROYAL FLYING DOCTOR SERVICE AT ALL? Yes, I do actually. It’s – I think it’s probably more lonely now because you used to switch it on and – you know if you’re here on your own like I am a lot – and you’d hear voices talking, and you used to know what everybody was doing – sort of all their dramas and all their [...] Now you don’t know anything that’s going on and unless somebody rings you, you don’t have that communication, where before you used to just hop over to another channel and have a chat [...] I think it is lonelier on the telephone because it costs so much to ring up. (Felicity Rohrer, female, 40-54, homestead.) Coupled with the lack of privacy of 2-way radio communication, and the lack of broadcasting, was the particular dynamic of a traditional station family. Schooled at home, and integrated within their homestead lifestyle, station children spent most of their formative years in the company of one or other of their parents (or, in previous decades, the station staff). This all changed at secondary school age when the children of station-owners and managers tended to be sent away to boarding school in the city. Exposure of the next generation to the ways of city life was seen as a necessary background to future business competence, but the transitions from ‘all’ to ‘next-to-nothing’ in terms of children’s integration within family life had a huge socio-emotional cost which was aggravated, until the introduction of the phone service, by the lack of private communication channels. Public Relations and news theory talk about the importance of the ‘environmental scan’ to understand how current events are going to impact upon a business and a family: for many years in outback Australia the environmental scan occurred when families got together (typically in the social and sporting rounds), on the RFDS radio broadcasts and ‘meetings’, in infrequent visits to the closest towns and through the giving and receiving of hospitality. Felicity Rohrer, who commented (above) about how she missed the RFDS had noted earlier in her interview: “It’s made a big difference, telephone. That was the most isolating thing, especially when your children were away at school or your parents are getting older [...] That was the worst thing, not having a phone.” Further, in terms of the economics of running a property, Troy Bowen (male, 25-39, homestead respondent) noted that the phone had made commercial life much easier: I can carry out business on the phone without anyone else hearing [...] On the radio you can’t do it, you more or less have to say ‘well, have you got it – over’. ‘Yeah – over’. ‘Well, I’ll take it – over’. That’s all you can do [...] Say if I was chasing something [...] the cheapest I might get it down to might be [...] $900. Well I can go to the next bloke and I can tell him I got it down to $850. If you can’t do any better than that, you miss out. ‘oh, yes, alright $849, that’s the best I can do.’ So I’ll say ‘alright, I’ll take it’. But how can you do that on the radio and say that your best quote is [$850] when the whole district knows that ‘no, it isn’t’. You can’t very well do it, can you? This dynamic occurs because, for many homestead families prior to the telephone, the RFDS broadcasts were continuously monitored by the women of the station as a way of keeping a finger on the pulse of the community. Even – sometimes, especially – when they were not part of the on-air conversation, the broadcast could be received for as far as reception was possible. The introduction of the phone led to a new level of privacy, particularly appreciated by parents who had children away at school, but also introduced new problems. Fran Coleridge, (female, 40-54, Sandstone) predicted that: The phone will lead to isolation. There’s an old lady down here, she’s about 80, and she housekeeps for her brother and she’s still wearing – her mother died 50 years ago – but she’s still wearing her clothes. She is so encapsulated in her life. And she used to have her [RFDS] transceiver. Any time, Myrtle would know anything that’s going on. Anything. Birthday party at [local station], she’d know about it. She knew everything. Because she used to have the transceiver on all the time. And now there’s hardly any people on, and she’s a poor little old lonely lady that doesn’t hear anything now. Can you see that? Given the nuances of the introduction of the telephone (and the loss of the RFDS 2-way), what was the perceived impact of satellite broadcasting? Savannah Kingston again: Where previously we might have sat around the table and talked about things – at least the kids and I would – with television there is now more of a habit of coming in, showering and changing for dinner, putting on the motor and the men go and sit in front of the television during [...] six o’clock onwards, news programs and whatnot and um, I find myself still in the kitchen, getting the meal and then whoever was going to eat it, wanting to watch whatever was on the television. So it changed quite appreciably. Felicity Rohrer agrees: [Int:] DO YOU THINK THERE HAVE BEEN CHANGES IN THE TIME THAT YOU SPEND WITH EACH OTHER? Yes, I think so. They [the homestead household] come home and they – we all sit down here and look at the news and have a drink before tea whereas people used to be off doing their own tea. [Int] SO YOU THINK IT’S INCREASED THE AMOUNT OF TIME YOU SPEND TOGETHER? Yes, I think so – well, as a family. They all try and be home by 6 to see the [GWN] news. If they miss that, we look at the 7 o’clock [ABC], but they like the Golden West because it’s got country news in it. But the realities of everyday life, as experienced in domestic contexts, are sometimes ignored by commentators and analysts, except insofar as they are raised by interviewees. Thus the advent of the satellite might have made Savannah Kingston feel “a bit sad actually”, but it had its compensations: It was definitely a bit of a peace-maker. It sort of meant there wasn’t the stress that we had previously when going through [...] at least people sitting and watching something, you’re not so likely to get into arguments or [...] It definitely had value there. In fact, when I think about it, that might be one of its major applications, ’cos a lot of men in the bush tend to come in – if they drink to excess they start drinking in the evening, and that can make for very uncomfortable company. For film-makers like the Weeping Camel crew – and for audiences and readers of historical accounts of life in outback Australia – the changes heralded by the end of scanning the RFDS channels, and the start of scanning for satellite channels, may seem like the end of an era. In some ways the rhythms of broadcasting helped to homogenise life in the country with life in the city. For many families in remote homes, as well as the metropolis, the evening news became a cue for the domestic rituals of ‘after work’. A superficial evaluation of communications changes might lead to a consideration of how some areas of life were threatened by improved broadcasting, while others were strengthened, and how some of the uniqueness of a lifestyle had been compromised by an absorption into the communication patterns of urban life. It is unwise for commentators to construct the pre-television past as an uncomplicated romantic prior-time, however. Interviews with those who live such changes as their reality become a more revealing indicator of the nuances and complexities of communications environments than a quick scan from the perspective of the city-dweller. References Day, C. “Packer: The Man and the Message.” The Video Age (February 1983): 7 (cited in Hazelhurst). Hazelhurst, Cameron. “The Dawn of the Satellite Era.” Media Information Australia 58 (November 1990): 9-22. Staley, Tony. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates. Canberra: House of Representatives Hansard (18 October 1979): 2225, 2228-9. The Remains of the Day. 1993. The Story of the Weeping Camel. Thinkfilm and National Geographic, 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>. APA Style Green, L. (Aug. 2005) "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>.

The use of the family home as a setting for television sitcoms (situation comedies) has long been recognised for its ability to provide audiences with an identifiable site of ontological security (much discussed by Giddens, Scannell, Saunders and others). From the beginnings of American sitcoms with such programs as Leave it to Beaver, and through the trail of The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and on to Home Improvement, That 70s Show and How I Met Your Mother, the US has led the way with screenwriters and producers capitalising on the value of using the suburban family dwelling as a fixed setting. The most obvious advantage is the use of an easily constructed and inexpensive set, most often on a TV studio soundstage requiring only a few rooms (living room, kitchen and bedroom are usually enough to set the scene), and a studio audience. In Singapore, sitcoms have had similar successes; portraying the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in their home settings. Some programs have achieved phenomenal success, including an unprecedented ten year run for Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd from 1996-2007, closely followed by Under One Roof (1994-2000 and an encore season in 2002), and Living with Lydia (2001-2005). This article furthers Blunt and Dowling’s exploration of the “critical geography” of home, by providing a focused analysis of home-based sitcoms in the nation-state of Singapore. The use of the home tells us a lot. Roseanne’s cluttered family home represents a lived reality for working-class families throughout the Western world. In Friends, the seemingly wealthy ‘young’ people live in a fashionable apartment building, while Seinfeld’s apartment block is much less salubrious, indicating (in line with the character) the struggle of the humble comedian. Each of these examples tells us something about not just the characters, but quite often about class, race, and contemporary societies. In the Singaporean programs, the home in Under One Roof (hereafter UOR) represents the major form of housing in Singapore, and the program as a whole demonstrates the workability of Singaporean multiculturalism in a large apartment block. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK) demonstrates the entrepreneurial abilities of even under-educated Singaporeans, with its lead character, a building contractor, living in a large freestanding dwelling – generally reserved for the well-heeled of Singaporean society. And in Living with Lydia (LWL) (a program which demonstrates Singapore’s capacity for global integration), Hong Kong émigré Lydia is forced to share a house (less ostentatious than PCK’s) with the family of the hapless Billy B. Ong. There is perhaps no more telling cultural event than the sitcom. In the 1970s, The Brady Bunch told us more about American values and habits than any number of news reports or cop shows. A nation’s identity is uncovered; it bares its soul to us through the daily tribulations of its TV households. In Singapore, home-based sitcoms have been one of the major success stories in local television production with each of these three programs collecting multiple prizes at the region-wide Asian Television Awards. These sitcoms have been able to reflect the ideals and values of the Singaporean nation to audiences both at ‘home’ and abroad. This article explores the worlds of UOR, PCK, and LWL, and the ways in which each of the fictional homes represents key features of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Singapore. Through ownership and regulation, Singaporean TV programs operate as a firm link between the state and its citizens. These sitcoms follow regular patterns where the ‘man of the house’ is more buffoon than breadwinner – in a country defined by its neo-Confucian morality, sitcoms allow a temporary subversion of patriarchal structures. In this article I argue that the central theme in Singaporean sitcoms is that while home is a personal space, it is also a valuable site for national identities to be played out. These identities are visible in the physical indicators of the exterior and interior living spaces, and the social indicators representing a benign patriarchy and a dominant English language. Structure One of the key features of sitcoms is the structure: cold open – titles – establishing shot – opening scene. Generally the cold opening (aka “the teaser”) takes place inside the home to quickly (re)establish audience familiarity with the location and the characters. The title sequence then features, in the case of LWL and PCK, the characters outside the house (in LWL this is in cartoon format), and in UOR (see Figure 1) it is the communal space of the barbeque area fronting the multi-story HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment blocks. Figure 1: Under One Roof The establishing shot at the end of each title sequence, and when returning from ad breaks, is an external view of the characters’ respective dwellings. In Seinfeld this establishing shot is the New York apartment block, in Roseanne it is the suburban house, and the Singaporean sitcoms follow the same format (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Phua Chu Kang External Visions of the Home This emphasis on exterior buildings reminds the viewer that Singaporean housing is, in many ways, unique. As a city-state (and a young one at that) its spatial constraints are particularly limiting: there simply isn’t room for suburban housing on quarter acre blocks. It rapidly transformed from an “empty rock” to a scattered Malay settlement of bay and riverside kampongs (villages) recognisable by its stilt houses. Then in the shadow of colonialism and the rise of modernity, the kampongs were replaced in many cases by European-inspired terrace houses. Finally, in the post-colonial era high-rise housing began to swell through the territory, creating what came to be known as the “HDB new town”, with some 90% of the population now said to reside in HDB units, and many others living in private high-rises (Chang 102, 104). Exterior shots used in UOR (see Figure 3) consistently emphasise the distinctive HDB blocks. As with the kampong housing, high-rise apartments continue notions of communal living in that “Living below, above and side by side other people requires tolerance of neighbours and a respect towards the environment of the housing estate for the good of all” (104). The provision of readily accessible public housing was part of the “covenant between the newly enfranchised electorate and the elected government” (Chua 47). Figure 3: Establishing shot from UOR In UOR, we see the constant interruption of the lives of the Tan family by their multi-ethnic neighbours. This occurs to such an extent as to be a part of the normal daily flow of life in Singaporean society. Chang argues that despite the normally interventionist activities of the state, it is the “self-enforcing norms” of behaviour that have worked in maintaining a “peaceable society in high-rise housing” (104). This communitarian attitude even extends to the large gated residence of PCK, home to an almost endless stream of relatives and friends. The gate itself seems to perform no restrictive function. But such a “peaceable society” can also be said to be a result of state planning which extends to the “racial majoritarianism” imposed on HDB units in the form of quotas determining “the actual number of households of each of the three major races [Chinese, Malay and Indian] … to be accommodated in a block of flats” (Chua 55). Issues of race are important in Singapore where “the inscription of media imagery bears the cultural discourse and materiality of the social milieu” (Wong 120) perhaps nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the segregation of TV channels along linguistic / cultural lines. These 3 programs all featured on MediaCorp TV’s predominantly English-language Channel 5 and are, in the words of Roland Barthes, “anchored” by dint of their use of English. Home Will Eat Itself The consumption of home-based sitcoms by audiences in their own living-rooms creates a somewhat self-parodying environment. As John Ellis once noted, it is difficult to escape from the notion that “TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon” (113) in that it constantly attempts to “include the audiences own conception of themselves into the texture of its programmes” (115). In each of the three Singaporean programs living-rooms are designed to seat characters in front of a centrally located TV set – at most all the audience sees is the back of the TV, and generally only when the TV is incorporated into a storyline, as in the case of PCK in Figure 4 (note the TV set in the foreground). Figure 4: PCK Even in this episode of PCK when the lead characters stumble across a pornographic video starring one of the other lead characters, the viewer only hears the program. Perhaps the most realistic (and acerbic) view of how TV reorganises our lives – both spatially in the physical layout of our homes, and temporally in the way we construct our viewing habits (eating dinner or doing the housework while watching the screen) – is the British “black comedy”, The Royle Family. David Morley (443) notes that “TV and other media have adapted themselves to the circumstances of domestic consumption while the domestic arena itself has been simultaneously redefined to accommodate their requirements”. Morley refers to The Royle Family’s narrative that rests on the idea that “for many people, family life and watching TV have become indistinguishable to the extent that, in this fictional household, it is almost entirely conducted from the sitting positions of the viewers clustered around the set” (436). While TV is a central fixture in most sitcoms, its use is mostly as a peripheral thematic device with characters having their viewing interrupted by the arrival of another character, or by a major (within the realms of the plot) event. There is little to suggest that “television schedules have instigated a significant restructuring of family routines” as shown in Livingstone’s audience-based study of UK viewers (104). In the world of the sitcom, the temporalities of characters’ lives do not need to accurately reflect that of “real life” – or if they do, things quickly descend to the bleakness exemplified by the sedentary Royles. As Scannell notes, “broadcast output, like daily life, is largely uneventful, and both are punctuated (predictably and unpredictably) by eventful occasions” (4). To show sitcom characters in this static, passive environment would be anathema to the “real” viewer, who would quickly lose interest. This is not to suggest that sitcoms are totally benign though as with all genres they are “the outcome of social practices, received procedures that become objectified in the narratives of television, then modified in the interpretive act of viewing” (Taylor 14). In other words, they feature a contextualisation that is readily identifiable to members of an established society. However, within episodes themselves, it as though time stands still – character development is almost non-existent, or extremely slow at best and we see each episode has “flattened past and future into an eternal present in which parents love and respect one another, and their children forever” (Taylor 16). It takes some six seasons before the character of PCK becomes a father, although in previous seasons he acts as a mentor to his nephew, Aloysius. Contained in each episode, in true sitcom style, are particular “narrative lines” in which “one-liners and little comic situations [are] strung on a minimal plot line” containing a minor problem “the solution to which will take 22 minutes and pull us gently through the sequence of events toward a conclusion” (Budd et al. 111). It is important to note that the sitcom genre does not work in every culture, as each locale renders the sitcom with “different cultural meanings” (Nielsen 95). Writing of the failure of the Danish series Three Whores and a Pickpocket (with a premise like that, how could it fail?), Nielsen (112) attributes its failure to the mixing of “kitchen sink realism” with “moments of absurdity” and “psychological drama with expressionistic camera work”, moving it well beyond the strict mode of address required by the genre. In Australia, soap operas Home and Away and Neighbours have been infinitely more popular than our attempts at sitcoms – which had a brief heyday in the 1980s with Hey Dad..!, Kingswood Country and Mother and Son – although Kath and Kim (not studio-based) could almost be counted. Lichter et al. (11) state that “television entertainment can be ‘political’ even when it does not deal with the stuff of daily headlines or partisan controversy. Its latent politics lie in the unavoidable portrayal of individuals, groups, and institutions as a backdrop to any story that occupies the foreground”. They state that US television of the 1960s was dominated by the “idiot sitcom” and that “To appreciate these comedies you had to believe that social conventions were so ironclad they could not tolerate variations. The scripts assumed that any minute violation of social conventions would lead to a crisis that could be played for comic results” (15). Series like Happy Days “harked back to earlier days when problems were trivial and personal, isolated from the concerns of a larger world” (17). By the late 1980s, Roseanne and Married…With Children had “spawned an antifamily-sitcom format that used sarcasm, cynicism, and real life problems to create a type of in-your-face comedy heretofore unseen on prime time” (20). This is markedly different from the type of values presented in Singaporean sitcoms – where filial piety and an unrelenting faith in the family unit is sacrosanct. In this way, Singaporean sitcoms mirror the ideals of earlier US sitcoms which idealise the “egalitarian family in which parental wisdom lies in appeals to reason and fairness rather than demands for obedience” (Lichter et al. 406). Dahlgren notes that we are the products of “an ongoing process of the shaping and reshaping of identity, in response to the pluralised sets of social forces, cultural currents and personal contexts encountered by individuals” where we end up with “composite identities” (318). Such composite identities make the presentation (or re-presentation) of race problematic for producers of mainstream television. Wong argues that “Within the context of PAP hegemony, media presentation of racial differences are manufactured by invoking and resorting to traditional values, customs and practices serving as symbols and content” (118). All of this is bound within a classificatory system in which each citizen’s identity card is inscribed as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (often referred to as CMIO), and a broader social discourse in which “the Chinese are linked to familial values of filial piety and the practice of extended family, the Malays to Islam and rural agricultural activities, and the Indians to the caste system” (Wong 118). However, these sitcoms avoid directly addressing the issue of race, preferring to accentuate cultural differences instead. In UOR the tables are turned when a none-too-subtle dig at the crude nature of mainland Chinese (with gags about the state of public toilets), is soon turned into a more reverential view of Chinese culture and business acumen. Internal Visions of the Home This reverence for Chinese culture is also enacted visually. The loungeroom settings of these three sitcoms all provide examples of the fashioning of the nation through a “ubiquitous semi-visibility” (Noble 59). Not only are the central characters in each of these sitcoms constructed as ethnically Chinese, but the furnishings provide a visible nod to Chinese design in the lacquered screens, chairs and settees of LWL (see Figure 5.1), in the highly visible pair of black inlaid mother-of-pearl wall hangings of UOR (see Figure 5.2) and in the Chinese statuettes and wall-hangings found in the PCK home. Each of these items appears in the central view of the shows most used setting, the lounge/family room. There is often symmetry involved as well; the balanced pearl hangings of UOR are mirrored in a set of silk prints in LWL and the pair of ceramic Chinese lions in PCK. Figure 5.1: LWL Figure 5.2: UOR Thus, all three sitcoms feature design elements that reflect visible links to Chinese culture and sentiments, firmly locating the sitcoms “in Asia”, and providing a sense of the nation. The sets form an important role in constructing a realist environment, one in which “identification with realist narration involves a temporary merger of at least some of the viewer’s identity with the position offered by the text” (Budd et al. 110). These constant silent reminders of the Chinese-based hegemon – the cultural “majoritarianism” – anchors the sitcoms to a determined concept of the nation-state, and reinforces the “imaginative geographies of home” (Blunt and Dowling 247). The Foolish “Father” Figure in a Patriarchal Society But notions of a dominant Chinese culture are dealt with in a variety of ways in these sitcoms – not the least in a playful attitude toward patriarchal figures. In UOR, the Tan family “patriarch” is played by Moses Lim, in PCK, Gurmit Singh plays Phua and in LWL Samuel Chong plays Billy B. Ong (or, as Lydia mistakenly refers to him Billy Bong). Erica Sharrer makes the claim that class is a factor in presenting the father figure as buffoon, and that US sitcoms feature working class families in which “the father is made to look inept, silly, or incompetent have become more frequent” partly in response to changing societal structures where “women are shouldering increasing amounts of financial responsibility in the home” (27). Certainly in the three series looked at here, PCK (the tradesman) is presented as the most derided character in his role as head of the household. Moses Lim’s avuncular Tan Ah Teck is presented mostly as lovably foolish, even when reciting his long-winded moral tales at the conclusion of each episode, and Billy B. Ong, as a middle-class businessman, is presented more as a victim of circumstance than as a fool. Sharrer ponders whether “sharing the burden of bread-winning may be associated with fathers perceiving they are losing advantages to which they were traditionally entitled” (35). But is this really a case of males losing the upper hand? Hanke argues that men are commonly portrayed as the target of humour in sitcoms, but only when they “are represented as absurdly incongruous” to the point that “this discursive strategy recuperates patriarchal notions” (90). The other side of the coin is that while the “dominant discursive code of patriarchy might be undone” (but isn’t), “the sitcom’s strategy for containing women as ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ is always contradictory and open to alternative readings” (Hanke 77). In Singapore’s case though, we often return to images of the women in the kitchen, folding the washing or agonising over the work/family dilemma, part of what Blunt and Dowling refer to as the “reproduction of patriarchal and heterosexist relations” often found in representations of “the ideal’ suburban home” (29). Eradicating Singlish One final aspect of these sitcoms is the use of language. PM Lee Hsien Loong once said that he had no interest in “micromanaging” the lives of Singaporeans (2004). Yet his two predecessors (PM Goh and PM Lee Senior) both reflected desires to do so by openly criticising the influence of Phua Chu Kang’s liberal use of colloquial phrases and phrasing. While the use of Singlish (or Singapore Colloquial English / SCE) in these sitcoms is partly a reflection of everyday life in Singapore, by taking steps to eradicate it through the Speak Good English movement, the government offers an intrusion into the private home-space of Singaporeans (Ho 17). Authorities fear that increased use of Singlish will damage the nation’s ability to communicate on a global basis, withdrawing to a locally circumscribed “pidgin English” (Rubdy 345). Indeed, the use of Singlish in UOR is deliberately underplayed in order to capitalise on overseas sales of the show (which aired, for example, on Australia’s SBS television) (Srilal). While many others have debated the Singlish issue, my concern is with its use in the home environment as representative of Singaporean lifestyles. As novelist Hwee Hwee Tan (2000) notes: Singlish is crude precisely because it’s rooted in Singapore’s unglamorous past. This is a nation built from the sweat of uncultured immigrants who arrived 100 years ago to bust their asses in the boisterous port. Our language grew out of the hardships of these ancestors. Singlish thus offers users the opportunity to “show solidarity, comradeship and intimacy (despite differences in background)” and against the state’s determined efforts to adopt the language of its colonizer (Ho 19-20). For this reason, PCK’s use of Singlish iterates a “common man” theme in much the same way as Paul Hogan’s “Ocker” image of previous decades was seen as a unifying feature of mainstream Australian values. That the fictional PCK character was eventually “forced” to take “English” lessons (a storyline rapidly written into the program after the direct criticisms from the various Prime Ministers), is a sign that the state has other ideas about the development of Singaporean society, and what is broadcast en masse into Singaporean homes. Conclusion So what do these home-based sitcoms tell us about Singaporean nationalism? Firstly, within the realms of a multiethnic society, mainstream representations reflect the hegemony present in the social and economic structures of Singapore. Chinese culture is dominant (albeit in an English-speaking environment) and Indian, Malay and Other cultures are secondary. Secondly, the home is a place of ontological security, and partial adornment with cultural ornaments signifying Chinese culture are ever-present as a reminder of the Asianness of the sitcom home, ostensibly reflecting the everyday home of the audience. The concept of home extends beyond the plywood-prop walls of the soundstage though. As Noble points out, “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54) through the banal nationalism exhibited in “the furniture of everyday life” (55). In a Singaporean context, Velayutham (extending the work of Morley) explores the comforting notion of Singapore as “home” to its citizens and concludes that the “experience of home and belonging amongst Singaporeans is largely framed in the materiality and social modernity of everyday life” (4). Through the use of sitcoms, the state is complicit in creating and recreating the family home as a site for national identities, adhering to dominant modes of culture and language. References Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Budd, Mike, Steve Craig, and Clay Steinman. Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1999. Chang, Sishir. “A High-Rise Vernacular in Singapore’s Housing Development Board Housing.” Berkeley Planning Journal 14 (2000): 97-116. Chua, Beng Huat. “Public Housing Residents as Clients of the State.” Housing Studies 15.1 (2000). Dahlgren, Peter. “Media, Citizenship and Civic Culture”. Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. London: Arnold, 2000. 310-328. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Hanke, Robert. “The ‘Mock-Macho’ Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and its Reiteration.” Western Journal of Communication 62.1 (1998). Ho, Debbie G.E. “‘I’m Not West. I’m Not East. So How Leh?’” English Today 87 22.3 (2006). Lee, Hsien Loong. “Our Future of Opportunity and Promise.” National Day Rally 2004 Speech. 29 Apr. 2007 http://www.gov.sg/nd/ND04.htm>. Lichter, S. Robert, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman. Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1994. Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage, 2002 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 (2003). Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002). Rubdy, Rani. “Creative Destruction: Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement.” World Englishes 20.3 (2001). Scannell, Paddy. “For a Phenomenology of Radio and Television.” Journal of Communication 45.3 (1995). Scharrer, Erica. “From Wise to Foolish: The Portrayal of the Sitcom Father, 1950s-1990s.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 45.1 (2001). Srilal, Mohan. “Quick Quick: ‘Singlish’ Is Out in Re-education Campaign.” Asia Times Online (28 Aug. 1999). Tan, Hwee Hwee. “A War of Words over ‘Singlish’: Singapore’s Government Wants Its Citizens to Speak Good English, But They Would Rather Be ‘Talking Cock’.” Time International 160.3 (29 July 2002). Taylor, Ella. “From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and Family Imagery in American Network Television.” Qualitative Sociology 12.1 (1989). Velayutham, Selvaraj. “Affect, Materiality, and the Gift of Social Life in Singapore.” SOJOURN 19.1 (2004). Wong, Kokkeong. Media and Culture in Singapore: A Theory of Controlled Commodification. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2001. Images Under One Roof: The Special Appearances. Singapore: Television Corporation of Singapore. VCD. 2000. Living with Lydia (Season 1, Volume 1). Singapore: MediaCorp Studios, Blue Max Enterprise. VCD. 2001. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (Season 5, Episode 10). Kuala Lumpur: MediaCorp Studios, Speedy Video Distributors. VCD. 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Pugsley, Peter. "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>. APA Style Pugsley, P. (Aug. 2007) "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>.

In the contemporary era, media spectacle organizes and mobilizes economic life, political conflict, social interactions, culture, and everyday life. My recently published book Media Spectacle explores a profusion of developments in hi-tech culture, media-driven society, and spectacle politics. Spectacle culture involves everything from film and broadcasting to Internet cyberculture and encompasses phenomena ranging from elections to terrorism and to the media dramas of the moment. For ‘Logo’, I am accordingly sketching out briefly a terrain I probe in detail in the book from which these examples are taken.1 During the past decades, every form of culture and significant forms of social life have become permeated by the logic of the spectacle. Movies are bigger and more spectacular than ever, with high-tech special effects expanding the range of cinematic spectacle. Television channels proliferate endlessly with all-day movies, news, sports, specialty niches, re-runs of the history of television, and whatever else can gain an audience. The rock spectacle reverberates through radio, television, CDs, computers networks, and extravagant concerts. The Internet encircles the world in the spectacle of an interactive and multimedia cyberculture. Media culture excels in creating megaspectacles of sports championships, political conflicts, entertainment, "breaking news" and media events, such as the O.J. Simpson trial, the Death of Princess Diana, or the sex or murder scandal of the moment. Megaspectacle comes as well to dominate party politics, as the political battles of the day, such as the Clinton sex scandals and impeachment, the 36 Day Battle for the White House after Election 2000, and the September 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent Terror War. These dramatic media passion plays define the politics of the time, and attract mass audiences to their programming, hour after hour, day after day. The concept of "spectacle" derives from French Situationist theorist Guy Debord's 1972 book Society of the Spectacle. "Spectacle," in Debord's terms, "unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena" (Debord 1970: #10). In one sense, it refers to a media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles. Spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society's basic values, and dreams and nightmares, putting on display dominant hopes and fears. They serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its conflicts and modes of conflict resolution. They include sports events, political campaigns and elections, and media extravaganzas like sensational murder trials, or the Bill Clinton sex scandals and impeachment spectacle (1998-1999). As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming ever more technologically dazzling and are playing an increasingly central role in everyday life. Under the influence of a postmodern image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, a semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and drama, which deeply influence thought and action. For Debord: "When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society" (#18). Today, however, I would maintain it is the multimedia spectacle of sight, sound, touch, and, coming to you soon, smell that constitutes the multidimensional sense experience of the new interactive spectacle. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a "permanent opium war" (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life -- recovering the full range of their human powers through creative praxis. The concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in passively consuming spectacles, one is separated from actively producing one's life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals passively observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The situationist project by contrast involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice. Since Debord's theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an "entertainment economy," business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.2 Via the "entertainmentization" of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).3 In a competitive business world, the "fun factor" can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers' attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and dining out are coded as an "experience," as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, it has to be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and "links to other cool sites." To succeed in the ultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace. Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s. Entertainment has always been a prime field of the spectacle, but in today's infotainment society, entertainment and spectacle have entered into the domains of the economy, politics, society, and everyday life in important new ways. Building on the tradition of spectacle, contemporary forms of entertainment from television to the stage are incorporating spectacle culture into their enterprises, transforming film, television, music, drama, and other domains of culture, as well as producing spectacular new forms of culture such as cyberspace, multimedia, and virtual reality. For Neil Gabler, in an era of media spectacle, life itself is becoming like a movie and we create our own lives as a genre like film, or television, in which we become "at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show" (1998: 4). On Gabler’s view, we star in our own "lifies," making our lives into entertainment acted out for audiences of our peers, following the scripts of media culture, adopting its role models and fashion types, its style and look. Seeing our lives in cinematic terms, entertainment becomes for Gabler "arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time--a force so overwhelming that it has metastasized into life" to such an extent that it is impossible to distinguish between the two (1998: 9). As Gabler sees it, Ralph Lauren is our fashion expert; Martha Stewart designs our sets; Jane Fonda models our shaping of our bodies; and Oprah Winfrey advises us on our personal problems.4 Media spectacle is indeed a culture of celebrity who provide dominant role models and icons of fashion, look, and personality. In the world of spectacle, celebrity encompasses every major social domain from entertainment to politics to sports to business. An ever-expanding public relations industry hypes certain figures, elevating them to celebrity status, and protects their positive image in the never-ending image wars and dangers that a celebrity will fall prey to the machinations of negative-image and thus lose celebrity status, and/or become figures of scandal and approbation, as will some of the players and institutions that I examine in Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003). Sports has long been a domain of the spectacle with events like the Olympics, World Series, Super Bowl, World Soccer Cup, and NBA championships attracting massive audiences, while generating sky-high advertising rates. These cultural rituals celebrate society's deepest values (i.e. competition, winning, success, and money), and corporations are willing to pay top dollar to get their products associated with such events. Indeed, it appears that the logic of the commodity spectacle is inexorably permeating professional sports which can no longer be played without the accompaniment of cheerleaders, giant mascots who clown with players and spectators, and raffles, promotions, and contests that feature the products of various sponsors. Sports stadiums themselves contain electronic reproduction of the action, as well as giant advertisements for various products that rotate for maximum saturation -- previewing environmental advertising in which entire urban sites are becoming scenes to boost consumption spectacles. Arenas, like the United Center in Chicago, America West Arena in Phoenix, on Enron Field in Houston are named after corporate sponsors. Of course, after major corporate scandals or collapse, like the Enron spectacle, the ballparks must be renamed! The Texas Ranger Ballpark in Arlington, Texas supplements its sports arena with a shopping mall, office buildings, and a restaurant in which for a hefty price one can watch the athletic events while eating and drinking.5 The architecture of the Texas Rangers stadium is an example of the implosion of sports and entertainment and postmodern spectacle. A man-made lake surrounds the stadium, the corridor inside is modeled after Chartes Cathedral, and the structure is made of local stone that provides the look of the Texas Capitol in Austin. Inside there are Texas longhorn cattle carvings, panels of Texas and baseball history, and other iconic signifiers of sports and Texas. The merging of sports, entertainment, and local spectacle is now typical in sports palaces. Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, Florida, for instance, "has a three-level mall that includes places where 'fans can get a trim at the barber shop, do their banking and then grab a cold one at the Budweiser brew pub, whose copper kettles rise three stories. There is even a climbing wall for kids and showroom space for car dealerships'" (Ritzer 1998: 229). Film has long been a fertile field of the spectacle, with "Hollywood" connoting a world of glamour, publicity, fashion, and excess. Hollywood film has exhibited grand movie palaces, spectacular openings with searchlights and camera-popping paparazzi, glamorous Oscars, and stylish hi-tech film. While epic spectacle became a dominant genre of Hollywood film from early versions of The Ten Commandments through Cleopatra and 2001 in the 1960s, contemporary film has incorporated the mechanics of spectacle into its form, style, and special effects. Films are hyped into spectacle through advertising and trailers which are ever louder, more glitzy, and razzle-dazzle. Some of the most popular films of the late 1990s were spectacle films, including Titanic, Star Wars -- Phantom Menace, Three Kings, and Austin Powers, a spoof of spectacle, which became one of the most successful films of summer 1999. During Fall 1999, there was a cycle of spectacles, including Topsy Turvy, Titus, Cradle Will Rock, Sleepy Hollow, The Insider, and Magnolia, with the latter featuring the biblical spectacle of the raining of frogs in the San Fernando Valley, in an allegory of the decadence of the entertainment industry and deserved punishment for its excesses. The 2000 Academy Awards were dominated by the spectacle Gladiator, a mediocre film that captured best picture award and best acting award for Russell Crowe, thus demonstrating the extent to which the logic of the spectacle now dominates Hollywood film. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular films of 2001 are also hi-tech spectacle, such as Moulin Rouge, a film spectacle that itself is a delirious ode to spectacle, from cabaret and the brothel to can-can dancing, opera, musical comedy, dance, theater, popular music, and film. A postmodern pastiche of popular music styles and hits, the film used songs and music ranging from Madonna and the Beatles to Dolly Parton and Kiss. Other 2001 film spectacles include Pearl Harbor, which re-enacts the Japanese attack on the U.S. that propelled the country to enter World War II, and that provided a ready metaphor for the September 11 terror attacks. Major 2001 film spectacles range from David Lynch’s postmodern surrealism in Mulholland Drive to Steven Spielberg’s blending of his typically sentimental spectacle of the family with the formalist rigor of Stanley Kubrick in A.I. And the popular 2001 military film Black-Hawk Down provided a spectacle of American military heroism which some critics believed sugar-coated the actual problems with the U.S. military intervention in Somalia, causing worries that a future U.S. adventure by the Bush administration and Pentagon would meet similar problems. There were reports, however, that in Somalian cinemas there were loud cheers as the Somalians in the film shot down the U.S. helicopter, and pursued and killed American soldiers, attesting to growing anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world against Bush administration policies. Television has been from its introduction in the 1940s a promoter of consumption spectacle, selling cars, fashion, home appliances, and other commodities along with consumer life-styles and values. It is also the home of sports spectacle like the Super Bowl or World Series, political spectacles like elections (or more recently, scandals), entertainment spectacle like the Oscars or Grammies, and its own spectacles like breaking news or special events. Following the logic of spectacle entertainment, contemporary television exhibits more hi-tech glitter, faster and glitzier editing, computer simulations, and with cable and satellite television, a fantastic array of every conceivable type of show and genre. TV is today a medium of spectacular programs like The X-Files or Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and spectacles of everyday life such as MTV's The Real World and Road Rules, or the globally popular Survivor and Big Brother series. Real life events, however, took over TV spectacle in 2000-2001 in, first, an intense battle for the White House in a dead-heat election, that arguably constitutes one of the greatest political crimes and scandals in U.S. history (see Kellner 2001). After months of the Bush administration pushing the most hardright political agenda in memory and then deadlocking as the Democrats took control of the Senate in a dramatic party re-affiliation of Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, the world was treated to the most horrifying spectacle of the new millennium, the September 11 terror attacks and unfolding Terror War that has so far engulfed Afghanistan and Iraq. These events promise an unending series of deadly spectacle for the foreseeable future.6 Hence, we are emerging into a new culture of media spectacle that constitutes a novel configuration of economy, society, politics, and everyday life. It involves new cultural forms, social relations, and modes of experience. It is producing an ever-proliferating and expanding spectacle culture with its proliferating media forms, cultural spaces, and myriad forms of spectacle. It is evident in the U.S. as the new millennium unfolds and may well constitute emergent new forms of global culture. Critical social theory thus faces important challenges in theoretically mapping and analyzing these emergent forms of culture and society and the ways that they may contain novel forms of domination and oppression, as well as potential for democratization and social justice. Works Cited Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1967. Gabler, Neil. Life the Movie. How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Kellner, Douglas. Grand Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Kellner, Douglas. From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Kellner, Douglas. Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions. Thousand Oaks, Cal. and London: Sage, 1998. Wolf, Michael J. Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces are Transforming Our Lives. New York: Times Books, 1999. Notes 1 See Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 2 Wolf's book is a detailed and useful celebration of the "entertainment economy," although he is a shill for the firms and tycoons that he works for and celebrates them in his book. Moreover, while entertainment is certainly an important component of the infotainment economy, it is an exaggeration to say that it drives it and is actually propelling it, as Wolf repeatedly claims. Wolf also downplays the negative aspects of the entertainment economy, such as growing consumer debt and the ups and downs of the infotainment stock market and vicissitudes of the global economy. 3 Another source notes that "the average American household spent $1,813 in 1997 on entertainment -- books, TV, movies, theater, toys -- almost as much as the $1,841 spent on health care per family, according to a survey by the US Labor Department." Moreover, "the price we pay to amuse ourselves has, in some cases, risen at a rate triple that of inflation over the past five years" (USA Today, April 2, 1999: E1). The NPD Group provided a survey that indicated that the amount of time spent on entertainment outside of the home –- such as going to the movies or a sport event – was up 8% from the early to the late 1990s and the amount of time in home entertainment, such as watching television or surfing the Internet, went up 2%. Reports indicate that in a typical American household, people with broadband Internet connections spend 22% more time on all-electronic media and entertainment than the average household without broadband. See “Study: Broadband in homes changes media habits” (PCWORLD.COM, October 11, 2000). 4 Gabler’s book is a synthesis of Daniel Boorstin, Dwight Macdonald, Neil Poster, Marshall McLuhan, and other trendy theorists of media culture, but without the brilliance of a Baudrillard, the incisive criticism of an Adorno, or the understanding of the deeper utopian attraction of media culture of a Bloch or Jameson. Likewise, Gabler does not, a la cultural studies, engage the politics of representation, or its economics and political economy. He thus ignores mergers in the culture industries, new technologies, the restructuring of capitalism, globalization, and shifts in the economy that are driving the impetus toward entertainment. Gabler does get discuss how new technologies are creating new spheres of entertainment and forms of experience and in general describes rather than theorizes the trends he is engaging. 5 The project was designed and sold to the public in part through the efforts of the son of a former President, George W. Bush. Young Bush was bailed out of heavy losses in the Texas oil industry in the 1980s by his father's friends and used his capital gains, gleaned from what some say as illicit insider trading, to purchase part-ownership of a baseball team to keep the wayward son out of trouble and to give him something to do. The soon-to-be Texas governor, and future President of the United States, sold the new stadium to local taxpayers, getting them to agree to a higher sales tax to build the stadium which would then become the property of Bush and his partners. This deal allowed Bush to generate a healthy profit when he sold his interest in the Texas Rangers franchise and to buy his Texas ranch, paid for by Texas tax-payers (for sources on the scandalous life of George W. Bush and his surprising success in politics, see Kellner 2001 and the further discussion of Bush Jr. in Chapter 6). 6 See Douglas Kellner, From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Kellner, Douglas. "Engaging Media Spectacle " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>. APA Style Kellner, D. (2003, Jun 19). Engaging Media Spectacle . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>

IntroductionThe existential question today is not whether to be or not to be, but how one can become what one truly is. (Golomb 200)In contemporary Western culture the ideal of living authentically, of being “true to yourself,” is ubiquitous. Authenticity is “taken for granted” as an absolute value in a multitude of areas, from music, to travel to identity (Lindholm 1). A core component of authentic selfhood is to find an occupation that is a “passion:” work that is “really you.” This article draws on recent qualitative interviews with Australians from a range of occupations about work, identity and meaning (James). It will demonstrate that for these contemporary individuals, occupation is often closely linked to perceptions of authentic selfhood. I begin by overviewing the significance and presence of authenticity as a value in contemporary culture through discussions of reality television and self-help literature focussed on careers. This is followed by a discussion of sociological theories of authenticity, drawing out the connections between the authentic self, modernity and work. The final section uses examples from the interviews to argue that the ideal of work being an extension of the authentic self is compelling because in providing direction and purpose, it helps the individual avoid anomie, disenchantment and other modern malaises (Taylor).The Authentic Self and Career Guidance in Contemporary Popular CultureThe prevalence of authenticity in contemporary Western popular culture can be seen in reality television programs like Master Chef (a cooking competition) and The Voice (a singing competition). Generally, contestants take part in the show in order to “follow their dreams” and pursue the career they feel they were “destined” for. When elimination is immanent, those at risk of departure are given one last chance to tell the judges what being in the competition means to them. This usually takes the form of a tearful monologue in which the contestant explains that the past few weeks have been the best of their life, that they finally feel “alive” and that they have found their “passion.” In these shows, finding work that is “really you”—that is an extension of your authentic-self—is portrayed as being a fundamental component of fulfillment and self-actualization.The same message is delivered in self-help media and texts. Since the 1970s, “finding your passion” and “finding yourself” have been popular subjects for the genre. The best known of these books is perhaps Richard Bolles’s What Color is Your Parachute?: a job-hunting manual aimed primarily at people looking for a career change. First published in 1970, a new edition has been released every year and there are over 10 million copies in print. In 1995 it was included in the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book’s 25 Books That Have Shaped Readers’ Lives, placing Bolles in the company of Cervantes and Tolstoy (Bolles).Bolles’s book and similar career guidance titles generally follow a pattern of providing exercises for the reader to help them discover the “real you,” which then becomes the basis for choosing the “right” occupation, or as Bolles puts it, “first deciding who you are before deciding the kind of work you want to pursue.” Another best-selling self-help writer is Phil McGraw or “Dr. Phil,” better known for his television program than his books. In his Self Matters—Creating Your Life from the Inside Out, McGraw begins bytelling the story of his own search for his authentic “passion.” Before moving into television, McGraw spent ten years working as a practicing psychiatrist. He recalls:So much of what I did—while totally okay if it had been what I had a passion for—was as unnatural for me as it would be for a dog. It didn’t come from the heart. It wasn’t something that sprang from who I really was ... I wasn’t doing what was meaningful for me. I wasn’t doing what I was good at and therefore was not pursuing my mission in life, my purpose for being here … You and everyone else has a mission, a purpose in life that cannot be denied if you are to live fully. If you have no purpose, you have no passion. If you have no passion, you have sold yourself out (7–12).McGraw connects living authentically with living meaningfully. Working in an occupation that is in accordance with the authentic self gives one’s life purpose. This is the same message Oprah Winfrey chose to deliver in the final episode of the The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was watched by more than 16 million viewers in the U.S. alone. Rather than following the usual pattern of the show and interview celebrity guests, Winfrey chose to talk directly to her viewers about what matters in life:Everybody has a calling, and your real job in life is to figure out what that is and get about the business of doing it. Every time we have seen a person on this stage who is a success in their life, they spoke of the job, and they spoke of the juice that they receive from doing what they knew they were meant to be doing [...] Because that is what a calling is. It lights you up and it lets you know that you are exactly where you're supposed to be, doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And that is what I want for all of you and hope that you will take from this show. To live from the heart of yourself.Like McGraw, Winfrey draws a link between living authentically—living “from the heart”—and finding a “calling.” The message here is that the person whose career is in accordance with their authentic self can live with certainty, direction and purpose. Authenticity may act as a buffer against the anomie and disenchantment that arguably plague individuals in late modernity (Elliott & du Gay).Disenchantment, Modernity and Authenticity For many sociologists, most famously Max Weber, finding something that gives life purpose is the great challenge for individuals in the modern West. In a disenchanted society, without religion or other “mysterious incalculable forces” to provide direction, individuals may struggle to work out what they should do with their lives (149). For Weber the answer is to find your calling. Each individual must discover the “demon who holds the fibers of his very life” and obey its demands (156).Following Weber, John Carroll has argued that in modern secular societies, individuals must draw on their inner resources to find answers to life’s “fundamental questions” (Ego 3–4). As Carroll stresses, it is not that the religious impulse has disappeared from contemporary society, but it is expressed in new ways. Individuals still yearn for a sense of purpose but they are “more likely to pursue their quests for meaning on their own, in experimental ways and with their main resource being their ontological qualities” (Carroll, Beauty 221).Other Australian academics, like Gary Bouma and David Tacey, argue that rather than a decline in religiosity in Australia, what we are seeing is a change in the way people pursue the spiritual. Tacey suggests that while many Australians may “slink away” from the idea of God as something external to our lives, they may find more resonance with a conception of God as a “core dimension” of the person (167). Contemporary Australians continue to yearn for guidance, but they are more likely to look within to find it.There is a clear link between this process of turning inward to pursue the spiritual, the prevalence of authenticity in contemporary Western culture, and modernity. With the breakdown of traditional structures, individuals become more “free to self-create” (Bauman, Identity 3). As Charles Lindholm describes it: “The inclination toward a spontaneous mode of expressive self-revelation correlates with the collapse of reliable and sacralised institutional frameworks that once offered meaning and succour” (65–66).For Charles Taylor, the origins of this “massive subjective turn of modern culture” (26) lie in the 18th-century romantic period with the idea that each individual has an intuitive moral sense. To determine what is right, the individual must be in touch with their “inner voice” and act in accordance with it. It is in this notion that Taylor identifies the background to the belief, which is so prominent today, that “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s” (28–29). Lindholm points to Rousseau as the “inventor” of this ideal, with his revelatory Confessions becoming “the harbinger of a new ideal in which exploring and revealing one’s essential nature was taken as an absolute good” (8). According to Rousseau, social norms suppress the individual’s true nature, and so it is only possible for one to be authentic if they break these chains and act in accordance with their inner depths. For employees in today’s service-oriented knowledge economy, there are significant risks involved in following Rousseau’s advice and expressing one’s “true feelings.” As many researchers have noted, in the new capitalism, workers are increasingly required to regulate their emotions and present themselves as calm, agreeable and above all positive (Hochschild; Sennett; Ehrenreich). To offer criticism or express frustration, to drop the “mask of cooperativeness” (Sennett 112), may mean risking one’s employment.Nevertheless, while it is arguably becoming more difficult to express authentic feeling at work, for contemporary workers, choice of occupation is still often closely linked to perceptions of authentic selfhood. In fact, in a time of increasingly fragmented careers and short-term, episodic work, it becomes more necessary to create a meaningful narrative to link numerous and varied jobs to a core sense of self. As Richard Sennett argues, today’s flexible employees—frequently moving from one workplace to the next—are at risk of “drift:” a sensation of aimless movement (30). To counter this, individuals must create a convincing story that provides a rationale for career changes and can thereby “form their characters into sustained narratives” (31).In the next section, drawing on recent empirical research, I argue that linking authentic selfhood to work provides individuals with a way to make sense of the trajectory of their work lives and to accept change. Today’s employees are able to interpret even the most unexpected career changes as a beneficial occurrence—something that was “meant to be”—by rationalising that such changes are part of a process of finding work that is an expression of the authentic self.The Authentic Self at Work: Being True to Your EssenceThe following discussion focuses on how authenticity as an ideal influences individuals’s work identity and career aspirations. It draws examples from recent qualitative interviews with Australian workers from a range of occupations (James 2012). A number of interviewees described a search for an occupation that was authentically “them,” a task that was well-suited to their capabilities and came “naturally:”I have a feeling that I was sort of a natural teacher. (Teacher, 60)Medical is what I like, that’s me. (Paramedic, 49)I found my thing, I stick to it. (Farrier, 27) These beliefs are quite clearly influenced by the idea of vocation, in that there is a particular task the individual is most suited to, but they do not invoke the sense of duty that a religious “calling” entails. Often, the interviewees had discovered the occupation that was “really them” by working in other jobs that were not their “true passion.” Realising that performing a particular role felt inauthentic helped them to define their authentic self and encouraged them to pursue more fulfilling work. This process often required experimentation, since “one knows what one is only after realising what one is not” (Golomb 201).For instance, Olivia, a 33-year old lawyer had begun her career in a corporate law firm. She had never felt comfortable in the corporate environment: “I always thought, ‘They know I don’t belong here’.” Her performance at work felt inauthentic: “I was never good at smiling and saying yes.” This experience led her to move into human rights, which she found more fulfilling. Similarly Hazel, a 50 year-old social worker, had started her career in what she described as “boring administration jobs.” Although she had “always wanted” to work in the “caring sector” her family’s expectations and her low self-confidence had stopped her from applying for university. When she finally quit the administration work and began to study it was liberating: “a weight had come out off my shoulders.” In her occupation as a social worker she felt that her work fitted with her authentic self: “the kind of person I am,” and for the first time in her life she looked forward to going to work. Both of these women, and many of the other interviewees, rationalised their decision to work in a particular field by appealing to narratives of authentic selfhood.Similarly, in explaining why they enjoyed their work, a number of interviewees looked back to their childhood for signs of what was “meant to be.” For instance, Tim, a 27 year-old farrier, justified his work with horses: “Mum came from a farming background, every school holidays I was up there…I followed my grandpa around like a little dog, annoyed and pestered him and asked him ‘Why’ and How?’ I’ve always been like that … So I think from an early age I was destined to do something like this.” Ken, a 50 year-old electrician, had a similar explanation for his choice of occupation: “Even as a little kid I was always mucking around with batteries and getting lights to work and things like that, so I think it was just a natural progression.”This tendency to associate childhood interests with authentic selfhood is perhaps due to the belief that childhood is a time of innocence and freedom, where the individual had not yet been moulded by society. As Duschinsky argues, childhood is often connected with an “originary natural essence.” We are close here to Rousseau’s “sentiment of being,” or its contemporary manifestation the “real you.” Of course, the idea that the child is free from external influence is problematised by ideas of socialisation. From birth the infant learns by copying “significant others” and self-conception is formed through interaction (Cooley; Mead). Therefore, from the very beginning, an individual’s interests, dispositions and tastes are influenced by family and culture.Shane, a 29 year-old real estate agent, had resisted working in property because it was the family business and he “didn’t want to be as boring as to follow in Dad’s footsteps.” He saw himself as “academic” and “creative” and for a number of years worked as a writer. Eventually though he decided that writing was not his calling: it was “not actually me … I categorise myself as someone who has the ability to write but not naturally.” When Shane began working in real-estate however, it felt almost automatic. Like the other members of his family he had the right skills and traits to thrive in the business and was immediately successful. Interestingly, Shane’s conception of his authenticity includes both a belief in an essential, pre-social “true” self and at the same time an understanding of the importance of the influence of family in the formation of the self.Regardless of whether the idea of a natural, inner-essence discernable in childhood pastimes can be disproven, it is clear that the understanding of authentic selfhood as an “immediate expression of our essence” continues to influence how individuals conceive of their work identities. However, at the same time, the interviewees’ accounts of authenticity also acknowledged the role of parents in influencing traits and dispositions. In these narratives of the self, authenticity encompasses opposing understandings of childhood as being both free from social influences and highly influenced by primary agents of socialisation. That individuals are willing to do the necessary mental and emotional work to maintain these contradictory beliefs suggests that there is a strong incentive to frame work identity as an expression of authentic selfhood.Authenticity Provides PurposeThe great benefit of being able to convincingly rationalise one’s work as a manifestation of the true self is that it gives the individual direction and purpose. Work then provides answers to Carroll’s fundamental questions: “who am I?” and “What should I do with my life?” A number of the interviewees recalled their attempts to secure a sense of purpose by linking their current occupation to their inner essence. As Greg, a 36-year-old fitness consultant described it:You just gotta think ‘What do you really wanna do, what makes you happy, what are you about?’ … I guess the strengthening and conditioning work, the fitness, has been the constant right the way through. It’s probably the core of what I’ve done over the years, seeing individuals and teams get fit. It’s what I do. That’s my role, if you put it in a nutshell. That’s what I’m about … I was sort of floating around a little bit … I need to go ‘This is what I am.’ By identifying his authentic self and linking it to his work, Greg was able to make sense of his past. He had once been a professional runner and after an injury was forced to redefine himself. He now rationalised that his ability to run had led him into the fitness field: You look at what is your life mission and basically what are you out here for … with athletics it’s allowed me to deal with any sport, made me flexible in my career … if I was, therefore born to run? Yeah, quite possibly, there had to be a reason. Like many of the interviewees, Greg had been forced to change his plans, but he was able to rationalise that this change was positive by forming a narrative that connected both his current and previous occupations to his perception of his authentic self. As Sennett describes it, he is able to from his character into a “sustained narrative” (31). Similarly, Trish, a 42 year-old retail coordinator, connected both her work as a chef and her job in a hardware store back to her sense of authentic self. Both occupations, she thought, were “down and dirty” and she linked this to her family “roots” and her identity as a “country girl.” In interpreting these two substantially different occupations as an expression of her true self, Trish is able to create a narrative in which unexpected career changes are as seen as something beneficial that was “meant to be.” These accounts of career trajectories suggest that linking authenticity to work identity is a strategy individuals employ to cope with the disorienting effects of fragmented work lives. Even jobs that are unfulfilling and feel inauthentic can be made meaningful by interpreting them as necessary steps leading towards the discovery of one’s “ true passion”. This is quite different to the ideal of a life-long calling in one occupation, which as Bauman has noted, has become a “privilege of the few” in late-modernity (Work 34). In an era of insecure and fragmented work, the narrative of an authentic self becomes particularly appealing as it allows the individual to create a meaningful work-narrative that can accommodate the numerous twists and turns of contemporary “liquid” existence (Bauman, Identity 5) and avoid “drift” (Sennett). Conclusion Drawing on qualitative research, this paper has analysed the connections between authenticity, work and modern selfhood. I have shown that in an era of flexible and fragmented working lives, work-identities are often closely tied to understandings of authentic selfhood. Interpreting particular kinds of work as being expressions of the authentic self provides individuals with a sense of purpose and in some cases assists them in coming to terms with unexpected career changes. A meaningful career narrative acts as a buffer against disorientation, disenchantment and anomie. It is therefore no wonder that authentic selfhood is such a prominent theme in reality television, self-help and other forms of popular culture, since it is taps into an existential need for a sense of purpose that becomes increasingly elusive in late-modernity. It is clear from the accounts presented in this paper that the pursuit of authenticity is not merely a narcissistic endeavor, and is employed by individuals to work through fundamental existential questions. Future work in this area should continue to make use of empirical research to add depth and complexity to theoretical accounts of authentic selfhood. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Identity in the Globalizing World.” Identity in Question. Ed. Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2009. 1–12. Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open UP, 1998. Bolles, Richard. What Colour Is Your Parachute 2015. 23 Jan. 2015 ‹http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/books/view/what-color-is-your-parachute-2015›. Bolles, Richard. What Colour Is Your Parachute. Berkley: Ten Speed, 1970. Bouma, Gary. Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Carroll, John. “Beauty contra God: Has Aesthetics Replaced Religion in Modernity?” Journal of Sociology 48.2 (2012): 206–23. Carroll, John. Ego and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning. Melbourne: Scribe, 2008. Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s, 1902. Duschinsky, Robbie. “Childhood Innocence: Essence, Education, and Performativity.” Textual Practice 27.5 (2013): 763–81. Elliott, Anthony, and Paul du Gay. “Editors’ Introduction.” Identity in Question. Eds. Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2009. xi–xxi. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-Sided : How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. New York: Henry Holt, 2009. Golomb, Jacob. In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London: Routledge, 1995. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization Human Feeling. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. James, Sara. “Making a Living, Making a Life: Contemporary Narratives of Work, Vocation and Meaning.” PhD Thesis. La Trobe U, 2012. Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. McGraw, Phil. Self Matters—Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. London: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1934. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York: WW Norton, 1998. Tacey, David. Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth. Sydney: Daimon, 2008. Taylor, Charles. Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills. London: Routledge, 1991. 129–56. Winfrey, Oprah. The Oprah Winfrey Show Finale. 23 Jan. 2015 ‹http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/The-Oprah-Winfrey-Show-Finale_1#ixzz3PbhBrdBs›.

Previously limited and somewhat neglected as a focus of academic scrutiny, interest in home and domesticity is now growing apace across the humanities and social sciences (Mallett; Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Home”; Blunt and Dowling). This is evidenced in the recent publication of a range of books on home from various disciplines (Chapman and Hockey; Cieraad; Miller; Chapman; Pink; Blunt and Dowling), the advent in 2004 of a new journal, Home Cultures, focused specifically on the subject of home and domesticity, as well as similar recent special issues in several other journals, including Antipode, Cultural Geographies, Signs and Housing, Theory and Society. This increased interest in the home as a site of social and cultural inquiry reflects a renewed fascination with home and domesticity in the media, popular culture and everyday life. Domestic life is explicitly central to the plot and setting of many popular and/or critically-acclaimed television programs, especially suburban dramas like Neighbours [Australia], Coronation Street [UK], Desperate Housewives [US] and The Secret Life of Us [Australia]. The deeply-held value of home – as a place that must be saved or found – is also keenly represented in films such as The Castle [Australia], Floating Life [Australia], Rabbit-Proof Fence [Australia], House of Sand and Fog [US], My Life as a House [US] and Under the Tuscan Sun [US]. But the prominence of home in popular media imaginaries of Australia and other Western societies runs deeper than as a mere backdrop for entertainment. Perhaps most telling of all is the rise and ratings success of a range of reality and/or lifestyle television programs which provide their audiences with key information on buying, building, renovating, designing and decorating home. In Australia, these include Backyard Blitz , Renovation Rescue, The Block, Changing Rooms, DIY Rescue, Location, Location and Our House. Likewise, popular magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and Australian Vogue Living tell us how to make our homes more beautiful and functional. Other reality programs, meanwhile, focus on how we might secure the borders of our suburban homes (Crimewatch [UK]) and our homeland (Border Security [Australia]). Home is also a strong theme in other media forms and debates, including life writing, novels, art and public dialogue about immigration and national values (see Blunt and Dowling). Indeed, notions of home increasingly frame ‘real world’ experiences, “especially for the historically unprecedented number of people migrating across countries”, where movement and resettlement are often configured through processes of leaving and establishing home (Blunt and Dowling 2). In this issue of M/C Journal we contribute to these critical voices and popular debates, seeking to further untangle the intricate and multi-layered connections between home and everyday life in the contemporary world. Before introducing the articles comprising this issue, we want to extend some of the key themes that weave through academic and popular discussions of home and domesticity, and which are taken up and extended here by the subsequent articles. Home is powerful, emotive and multi-faceted. As a basic desire for many, home is saturated with the meanings, memories, emotions, experiences and relationships of everyday life. The idea and place of home is perhaps typically configured through a positive sense of attachment, as a place of belonging, intimacy, security, relationship and selfhood. Indeed, many reinforce their sense of self, their identity, through an investment in their home, whether as house, hometown or homeland. But at the same time, home is not always a well-spring of succour and goodness; others experience alienation, rejection, hostility, danger and fear ‘at home’. Home can be a site of domestic violence or ‘house arrest’; young gay men and lesbians may feel alienated in the family home; asylum seekers are banished from their homelands; indigenous peoples are often dispossessed of their homelands; refugees might be isolated from a sense of belonging in their new home(land)s. But while this may seriously mitigate the affirmative experience of home, many still yearn for places, both figurative and material, to call ‘home’ – places of support, nourishment and belonging. The experience of violence, loss, marginalisation or dispossession can trigger, in Michael Brown’s words, “the search for a new place to call home”: “it means having to relocate oneself, to leave home and reconfigure it elsewhere” (50). Home, in this sense, understood as an ambiguous site of both belonging and alienation, is not a fixed and static location which ‘grounds’ an essential and unchanging sense of self. Rather, home is a process. If home enfolds and carries some sense of desire for positive feelings of attachment – and the papers in this special issue certainly suggest so, most quite explicitly – then equally this is a relationship that requires ongoing maintenance. Blunt and Dowling call these processes ‘homemaking practices’, and point to how home must be understood as a lived space which is “continually created and recreated through everyday practices” (23). In this way, home is posited as relational – the ever-changing outcome of the ongoing and mediated interaction between self, others and place. What stands out in much of the above discussion is the deep inter-connection between home, identity and self. Across the humanities and social sciences, home has been keenly explored as a crucial site “for the construction and reconstruction of one’s self” (Young 153). Indeed, Blunt and Dowling contend that “home as a place and an imaginary constitutes identities – people’s sense of themselves are related to and produced through lived and imaginative experiences of home” (24). Thus, through various homemaking practices, individuals generate a sense of self (and social groups produce a sense of collective identity) while they create a place called home. Moreover, as a relational entity, neither home nor identity are fixed, but mutually and ongoingly co-constituted. Homemaking enables changing and cumulative identities to be materialised in and supported by the home (Blunt and Dowling). Unfolding identities are progressively embedded and reflected in the home through both everyday practices and routines (Wise; Young), and accumulating and arranging personally meaningful objects (Marcoux; Noble, “Accumulating Being”). Consequently, as one ‘makes home’, one accumulates a sense of self. Given these intimate material and affective links between home, self and identity, it is perhaps not surprising that writing about a place called home has often been approached autobiographically (Blunt and Dowling). Emphasising the importance of autobiographical accounts for understanding home, Blunt argues that “through their accounts of personal memories and everyday experiences, life stories provide a particularly rich source for studying home and identity” (“Home and Identity”, 73). We draw attention to the importance of autobiographical accounts of home because this approach is prominent across the papers comprising this issue of M/C Journal. The authors have used autobiographical reflections to consider the meanings of home and processes of homemaking operating at various scales. Three papers – by Brett Mills, Lisa Slater and Nahid Kabir – are explicitly autobiographical, weaving scholarly arguments through deeply personal experiences, and thus providing evocative first-hand accounts of the power of home in the contemporary world. At the same time, several other authors – including Melissa Gregg, Gilbert Caluya and Jennifer Gamble – use personal experiences about home, belonging and exclusion to introduce or illustrate their scholarly contentions about home, self and identity. As this discussion suggests, home is relational in another way, too: it is the outcome of a relationship between material and imaginative qualities. Home is somewhere – it is situated, located, emplaced. But it is also much more than a location – as suggested by the saying, ‘A house is not a home’. Rather, a house becomes a home when it is imbued with a range of meanings, feelings and experiences by its occupants. Home, thus, is a fusion of the imaginative and affective – what we envision and desire home to be – intertwined with the material and physical – an actual location which can embody and realise our need for belonging, affirmation and sustenance. Blunt and Dowling capture this relationship between emplacement and emotion – the material and the imaginative – with their powerful assertion of home as a spatial imaginary, where “home is neither the dwelling nor the feeling, but the relation between the two” (22). Moreover, they demonstrate that this conceptualisation also detaches ‘home’ from ‘dwelling’ per se, and invokes the creation of home – as a space and feeling of belonging – at sites and scales beyond the domestic house. Instead, as a spatial imaginary, home takes form as “a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connects places” (Blunt and Dowling 2). The concept of home, then, entails complex scalarity: indeed, it is a multi-scalar spatial imaginary. Put quite simply, scale is a geographical concept which draws attention to the layered arenas of everyday life – body, house, neighbourhood, city, region, nation and globe, for instance – and this terminology can help extend our understanding of home. Certainly, for many, house and home are conflated, so that a sense of home is coterminous with a physical dwelling structure (e.g. Dupuis and Thorns). For others, however, home is signified by intimate familial or community relationships which extend beyond the residence and stretch across a neighbourhood (e.g. Moss). And moreover, without contradiction, we can speak of hometowns and homelands, so that home can be felt at the scale of the town, city, region or nation (e.g. Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora). For others – international migrants and refugees, global workers, communities of mixed descent – home can be stretched into transnational belongings (e.g. Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Home”). But this notion of home as a multi-scalar spatial imaginary is yet more complicated. While the above arenas (house, neighbourhood, nation, globe, etc.) are often simply posited as discrete territories, they also intersect and interact in complex ways (Massey; Marston). Extending this perspective, we can grasp the possibility of personal and collective homemaking processes operating across multiple scales simultaneously. For instance, making a house into a home invariably involves generating a sense of home and familiarity in a wider neighbourhood or nation-state. Indeed, Greg Noble points out that homemaking at the scale of the dwelling can be inflected by broader social and national values which are reflected materially in the house, in “the furniture of everyday life” (“Comfortable and Relaxed”, 55) – landscape paintings and national flags and ornaments, for example. He demonstrates that “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54). For others – those moving internationally between nation-states – domestic practices in dwelling structures are informed by cultural values and social ideals which extend well beyond the nation of settlement. Everyday domestic practices from one’s ‘land of origin’ are integral for ‘making home’ in a new house, neighbourhood and country at the same time (Hage). Many of the papers in this issue reflect upon the multi-scalarity of homemaking processes, showing how home must be generated across the multiple intersecting arenas of everyday life simultaneously. Indeed, given this prominence across the papers, we have chosen to use the scale of home as our organising principle for this issue. We begin with the links between the body – the geography closest to our skin (McDowell) – the home, and other scales, and then wind our way out through evocations of home at the intersecting scales of the house, the neighbourhood, the city, the nation and the diasporic. The rhetoric of home and belonging not only suggests which types of places can be posited as home (e.g. houses, neighbourhoods, nations), but also valorises some social relations and embodied identities as homely and others as unhomely (Blunt and Dowling; Gorman-Murray). The dominant ideology of home in the Anglophonic West revolves around the imaginary ‘ideal’ of white, middle-class, heterosexual nuclear family households in suburban dwellings (Blunt and Dowling). In our lead paper, Melissa Gregg explores how the ongoing normalisation of this particular conception of home in Australian politico-cultural discourse affects two marginalised social groups – sexual minorities and indigenous Australians. Her analysis is timely, responding to recent political attention to the domestic lives of both groups. Scrutinising the disciplinary power of ‘normal homes’, Gregg explores how unhomely (queer and indigenous) subjects and relationships unsettle the links between homely bodies, ideal household forms and national belonging in politico-cultural rhetoric. Importantly, she draws attention to the common experiences of these marginalised groups, urging “queer and black activists to join forces against wider tendencies that affect both communities”. Our first few papers then continue to investigate intersections between bodies, houses and neighbourhoods. Moving to the American context – but quite recognisable in Australia – Lisa Roney examines the connection between bodies and houses on the US lifestyle program, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in which families with disabled members are over-represented as subjects in need of home renovations. Like Gregg, Roney demonstrates that the rhetoric of home is haunted by the issue of ‘normalisation’ – in this case, EMHE ‘corrects’ and normalises disabled bodies through providing ‘ideal’ houses. In doing so, there is often a disjuncture between the homely ideal and what would be most helpful for the everyday domestic lives of these subjects. From an architectural perspective, Marian Macken also considers the disjuncture between bodily practices, inhabitation and ideal houses. While traditional documentation of house designs in working drawings capture “the house at an ideal moment in time”, Macken argues for post factum documentation of the house, a more dynamic form of architectural recording produced ‘after-the-event’ which interprets ‘the existing’ rather than the ideal. This type of documentation responds to the needs of the body in the inhabited space of domestic architecture, representing the flurry of occupancy, “the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon” the space of the house. Gilbert Caluya also explores the links between bodies and ideal houses, but from a different viewpoint – that of the perceived need for heightened home security in contemporary suburban Australia. With the rise of electronic home security systems, our houses have become extensions of our bodies – ‘architectural nervous systems’ which extend our eyes, ears and senses through modern security technologies. The desire for home security is predicated on controlling the interplay between the house and wider scales – the need to create a private and secure defensible space in hostile suburbia. But at the same time, heightened home security measures ironically connect the mediated home into a global network of electronic grids and military technologies. Thus, new forms of electronic home security stretch home from the body to the globe. Irmi Karl also considers the connections between technologies and subjectivities in domestic space. Her UK-based ethnographic analysis of lesbians’ techo-practices at home also considers, like Gregg, tactics of resistance to the normalisation of the heterosexual nuclear family home. Karl focuses on the TV set as a ‘straightening device’ – both through its presence as a key marker of ‘family homes’ and through the heteronormative content of programming – while at the same time investigating how her lesbian respondents renegotiated the domestic through practices which resisted the hetero-regulation of the TV – through watching certain videos, for instance, or even hiding the TV set away. Susan Thompson employs a similar ethnographic approach to understanding domestic practices which challenge normative meanings of home, but her subject is quite different. In an Australian-based study, Thompson explores meanings of home in the wake of relationship breakdown of heterosexual couples. For her respondents, their houses embodied their relationships in profoundly symbolic and physical ways. The deterioration and end of their relationships was mirrored in the material state of the house. The end of a relationship also affected homely, familiar connections to the wider neighbourhood. But there was also hope: new houses became sources of empowerment for former partners, and new meanings of home were created in the transition to a new life. Brett Mills also explores meanings of home at different scales – the house, neighbourhood and city – but returns to the focus on television and media technologies. His is a personal, but scholarly, response to seeing his own home on the television program Torchwood, filmed in Cardiff, UK. Mills thus puts a new twist on autobiographical narratives of home and identity: he uses this approach to examine the link between home and media portrayals, and how personal reactions to “seeing your home on television” change everyday perceptions of home at the scales of the house, neighbourhood and city. His reflection on “what happens when your home is on television” is solidly but unobtrusively interwoven with scholarly work on home and media, and speaks to the productive tension of home as material and imaginative. As the above suggests, especially with Mills’s paper, we have begun to move from the homely connections between bodies and houses to focus on those between houses, neighbourhoods and beyond. The next few papers extend these wider connections. Peter Pugsley provides a critical analysis of the meaning of domestic settings in three highly-successful Singaporean sitcoms. He argues that the domestic setting in these sitcoms has a crucial function in the Singaporean nation-state, linking the domestic home and national homeland: it is “a valuable site for national identities to be played out” in terms of the dominant modes of culture and language. Thus, in these domestic spaces, national values are normalised and disseminated – including the valorisation of multiculturalism, the dominance of Chinese cultural norms, benign patriarchy, and ‘proper’ educated English. Donna Lee Brien, Leonie Rutherford and Rosemary Williamson also demonstrate the interplay between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces and values in their case studies of the domestic sphere in cyberspace, examining three online communities which revolve around normatively domestic activities – pet-keeping, crafting and cooking. Their compelling case studies provide new ways to understand the space of the home. Home can be ‘stretched’ across public and private, virtual and physical spaces, so that “online communities can be seen to be domesticated, but, equally … the activities and relationships that have traditionally defined the home are not limited to the physical space of the house”. Furthermore, as they contend in their conclusion, these extra-domestic networks “can significantly modify practices and routines in the physical home”. Jennifer Gamble also considers the interplay of the virtual and the physical, and how home is not confined to the physical house. Indeed, the domestic is almost completely absent from the new configurations of home she offers: she conceptualises home as a ‘holding environment’ which services our needs and provides care, support and ontological security. Gamble speculates on the possibility of a holding environment which spans the real and virtual worlds, encompassing email, chatrooms and digital social networks. Importantly, she also considers what happens when there are ruptures and breaks in the holding environment, and how physical or virtual dimensions can compensate for these instances. Also rescaling home beyond the domestic, Alexandra Ludewig investigates concepts of home at the scale of the nation-state or ‘homeland’. She focuses on the example of Germany since World War II, and especially since re-unification, and provides an engaging discussion of the articulation between home and the German concept of ‘Heimat’. She shows how Heimat is ambivalent – it is hard to grasp the sense of longing for homeland until it is gone. Thus, Heimat is something that must be constantly reconfigured and maintained. Taken up in a critical manner, it also attains positive values, and Ludewig suggests how Heimat can be employed to address the Australian context of homeland (in)security and questions of indigenous belonging in the contemporary nation-state. Indeed, the next couple of papers focus on the vexed issue of building a sense home and belonging at the scale of the nation-state for non-indigenous Australians. Lisa Slater’s powerful autobiographical reflection considers how non-indigenous Australians might find a sense of home and belonging while recognising prior indigenous ownership of the land. She critically reflects upon “how non-indigenous subjects are positioned in relation to the original owners not through migrancy but through possession”. Slater urges us to “know our place” – we need not despair, but use such remorse in a productive manner to remake our sense of home in Australia – a sense of home sensitive to and respectful of indigenous rights. Nahid Kabir also provides an evocative and powerful autobiographical narrative about finding a sense of home and belonging in Australia for another group ‘beyond the pale’ – Muslim Australians. Hers is a first-hand account of learning to ‘feel at home’ in Australia. She asks some tough questions of both Muslim and non-Muslim Australians about how to accommodate difference in this country. Moreover, her account shows the homing processes of diasporic subjects – transnational homemaking practices which span several countries, and which enable individuals and social groups to generate senses of belonging which cross multiple borders simultaneously. Our final paper also contemplates the homing desires of diasporic subjects and the call of homelands – at the same time bringing our attention back to home at the scales of the house, neighbourhood, city and nation. As such, Wendy Varney’s paper brings us full circle, lucidly invoking home as a multi-scalar spatial imaginary by exploring the diverse and complex themes of home in popular music. Given the prevalence of yearnings about home in music, it is surprising so little work has explored the powerful conceptions of home disseminated in and through this widespread and highly mobile media form. Varney’s analysis thus makes an important contribution to our understandings of home presented in media discourses in the contemporary world, and its multi-scalar range is a fitting way to bring this issue to a close. Finally, we want to draw attention to the cover art by Rohan Tate that opens our issue. A Sydney-based photographer, Tate is interested in the design of house, home and the domestic form, both in terms of exteriors and interiors. This image from suburban Sydney captures the shifting styles of home in suburban Australia, giving us a crisp juxtaposition between modern and (re-valued) traditional housing forms. Bringing this issue together has been quite a task. We received 60 high quality submissions, and selecting the final 14 papers was a difficult process. Due to limits on the size of the issue, several good papers were left out. We thank the reviewers for taking the time to provide such thorough and useful reports, and encourage those authors who did not make it into this issue to keep seeking outlets for their work. The number of excellent submissions shows that home continues to be a growing and engaging theme in social and cultural inquiry. As editors, we hope that this issue of M/C Journal will make a vital contribution to this important range of scholarship, bringing together 14 new and innovative perspectives on the experience, location, creation and meaning of home in the contemporary world. References Blunt, Alison. “Home and Identity: Life Stories in Text and in Person.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 71-87. ———. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. ———. “Cultural Geographies of Home.” Progress in Human Geography 29.4 (2005): 505-515. ———, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Brown, Michael. Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe. London: Routledge, 2000. Chapman, Tony. Gender and Domestic Life: Changing Practices in Families and Households. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ———, and Jenny Hockey, eds. Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life. London: Routledge, 1999. Cieraad, Irene, ed. At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Dupuis, Ann, and David Thorns. “Home, Home Ownership and the Search for Ontological Security.” The Sociological Review 46.1 (1998): 24-47. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Homeboys: Uses of Home by Gay Australian Men.” Social and Cultural Geography 7.1 (2006): 53-69. Hage, Ghassan. “At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building.” Home/world: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Eds. Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds. Annandale: Pluto, 1997. 99-153. Mallett, Shelley. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-88. Marcoux, Jean-Sébastien. “The Refurbishment of Memory.” Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 69-86. Marston, Sally. “A Long Way From Home: Domesticating the Social Production of Scale.” Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society and Method. Eds. Eric Sheppard and Robert McMaster. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 170-191. Massey, Doreen. “A Place Called Home.” New Formations 17 (1992): 3-15. McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. Miller, Daniel, ed. Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Moss, Pamela. “Negotiating Space in Home Environments: Older Women Living with Arthritis.” Social Science and Medicine 45.1 (1997): 23-33. Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002): 53-66. ———. “Accumulating Being.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.2 (2004): 233-256. Pink, Sarah. Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Wise, J. Macgregor. “Home: Territory and Identity.” Cultural Studies 14.2 (2000): 295-310. Young, Iris Marion. “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme.” On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 123-154. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Robyn Dowling. "Home." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Gorman-Murray, A., and R. Dowling. (Aug. 2007) "Home," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/01-editorial.php>.

BackgroundIn the centuries since Odysseus entrusted his son Telemachus to Athena, biographical, literary, and historical accounts have cemented the concept of mentorship into our collective consciousness. Early foundational research characterised mentors as individuals who help us transition through different phases of our lives. Chief among these phases is the progression from adolescence to adulthood, during which we “imagine exciting possibilities for [our lives] and [struggle] to attain the ‘I am’ feeling in this dreamed-of self and world” (Levinson 93). Previous research suggests that mentoring can positively impact a range of developmental outcomes including emotional/behavioural resiliency, academic attainment, career advancement, and organisational productivity (DuBois et al. 57-91; Eby et al. 441-76; Merriam 161-73). The growth of formal mentoring programs, such as Big Brothers-Big Sisters, has further strengthened our belief in the value of mentoring in personal, academic and career contexts (Eby et al. 441-76).In recent years, claims of mentorship uptake have become widespread, even ubiquitous, ranging from codified components of organisational mandates to casual bragging rights in coffee shop conversations (Eby et al. 441-76). Is this a sign that mentorship has become indispensable to personal and professional development, or is mentorship simply in vogue? In this paper, we examine uses of, and corresponding meanings attached to, mentorship. Specifically, we compare popular news portrayals of mentoring with meanings ascribed to mentoring relationships by academics who are part of formal mentoring programs.MethodsWe searched for articles published in the New York Times between July and December 2015. Search terms used included: mentor, mentors, mentoring or mentorship. This U.S. national newspaper was chosen for its broad focus, and large online readership. It is among the most widely read online newspapers worldwide (World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers). Our search generated 536 articles. We conducted a qualitative thematic contentan alysis to explore the nature, scope, and importance of mentorship, as depicted in these media accounts. We compared media themes identified through this analysis with those generated through in-depth interviews previously conducted with 23 academic faculty in mentoring programs at the University of Calgary (Canada). Data were extracted by two authors, and discrepancies in interpretation were resolved through discussion with a third author.The Many Faces of MentorshipIn both interviews and New York Times (NYT) accounts, mentorship is portrayed as part of the “fabric” of contemporary culture, and is often viewed as essential to career advancement. As one academic we interviewed commented: “You know the worst feeling in the world [as a new employee] is...to feel like you’re floundering and you don’t know where to turn.” In 322 NYT articles, mentorship was linked to professional successes across a variety of disciplines, with CEOs, and popular culture icons, such as rap artists and sports figures, citing mentorship as central to their achievements. Mentorship had a particularly strong presence in the arts (109 articles), sports (62 articles) business (57 articles), politics (36 articles), medicine (26 articles), and law (21 articles).In the NYT, mentorship was also a factor in student achievement and social justice issues including psychosocial and career support for refugees and youth from low socioeconomic backgrounds; counteracting youth radicalisation; and addressing gender inequality in the workplace. In short, mentorship appears to have been taken up as a panacea for a variety of social and economic ills.Mentor Identities and RolesWhile mentors in academia were supervisors or colleagues, NYT articles portrayed mentors more broadly, as family members, employers, friends and peers. Mentoring relationships typically begin with a connection which often manifests as shared experiences or goals (Merriam). One academic interviewee described mentorship in these terms: “There’s something there that you both really respect and value.” In many NYT accounts, the connection between mentors and mentees was similarly emphasized. As a professional athlete noted: “To me, it's not about collecting [mentors]...It's if the person means something to me...played some type of role in my life” (Shpigel SP.1).While most mentoring relationships develop organically, others are created through formal programs. In the NYT, 33 articles described formal programs to support career/skills development in the arts, business, and sports, and behaviour change in at-risk youth. Although many such programs relied on volunteers, we noted instances in professional sports and business where individuals were hired to provide mentorship. We also saw evidence to suggest that formal programs may be viewed as a quick fix, or palatable alternative, to more costly, or long-term organisational or societal change. For instance, one article on operational challenges at a law firm noted: “The firm's leadership...didn't want to be told that they needed to overhaul their entire organizational philosophy.... They wanted to be told that the firm's problem was work-family conflict for women, a narrative that would allow them to adopt a set of policies specifically aimed at helping women work part time, or be mentored” (Slaughter SR.1).Mutuality of the RelationshipEffective mentoring occurs when both mentors and mentees value these relationships. As one academic interviewee noted: “[My mentor] asked me for advice on certain things about where they’re going right career wise... I think that’s allowed us to have a stronger sort of mentoring relationship”. Some NYT portrayals of mentorship also suggested rich, reciprocal relationships. A dancer with a ballet company described her mentor:She doesn't talk at you. She talks with you. I've never thought about dancing as much as I've thought about it working with her. I feel like as a ballerina, you smile and nod and you take the beating. This is more collaborative. In school, I was always waiting to find a professor that I would bond with and who would mentor me. All I had to do was walk over to Barnard, get into the studio, and there she was. I found Twyla. Or she found me. (Kourlas AR.7)The mutuality of the mentorship evident in this dancer’s recollection is echoed in a NYT account of the role of fashion models in mentoring colleagues: “They were...mentors and connectors and facilitators, motivated...by the joy of discovering talent and creating beauty” (Trebay D.8). Yet in other media accounts, mentorship appeared unidirectional, almost one-dimensional: “Judge Forrest noted in court that he had been seen as a mentor for young people” (Moynihan A.21). Here, the focus seemed to be on the benefits, or status, accrued by the mentor. Importance of the RelationshipAcademic interviewees viewed mentors as sources of knowledge, guidance, feedback, and sponsorship. They believed mentorship had profoundly impacted their careers and that “finding a mentor can be one of the most important things” anyone could do. In the NYT portrayals, mentors were also recognized for the significant, often lasting, impact they had on the lives of their mentees. A choreographer said “the lessons she learned from her former mentor still inspire her — ‘he sits on my shoulder’” (Gold CT 11). A successful CEO of a software firm recollected how mentors enabled him to develop professional confidence: “They would have me facilitate meetings with clients early on in my career. It helped build up this reservoir of confidence” (Bryant, Candid Questions BU.2).Other accounts in academic interviews and NYT highlighted how defining moments in even short-term mentoring relationships can provoke fundamental and lasting changes in attitudes and behaviours. One interviewee who recently experienced a career change said she derived comfort from connecting with a mentor who had experienced a similar transition: “oh there’s somebody [who] talks my language...there is a place for me.” As a CEO in the NYT recalled: “An early mentor of mine said something to me when I was going to a new job: ‘Don't worry. It's just another dog and pony show.’ That really stayed with me” (Bryant, Devil’s Advocate BU.2). A writer quoted in a NYT article also recounted how a chance encounter with a mentor changed the course of his career: “She said... that my problem was not having career direction. ‘You should become a teacher,’ she said. It was an unusual thing to hear, since that subject had never come up in our conversations. But I was truly desperate, ready to hear something different...In an indirect way, my life had changed because of that drink (DeMarco ST.6).Mentorship was also celebrated in the NYT in the form of 116 obituary notices as a means of honouring and immortalising a life well lived. The mentoring role individuals had played in life was highlighted alongside those of child, parent, grandparent and spouse.Metaphor and ArchetypeMetaphors imbue language with imagery that evokes emotions, sensations, and memories in ways that other forms of speech or writing cannot, thus enabling us communicate complex ideas or beliefs. Academic interviewees invoked various metaphors to illustrate mentorship experiences. One interviewee spoke of the “blossoming” relationship while another commented on the power of the mentoring experience to “lift your world”. In the NYT we identified only one instance of the use of metaphor. A CEO of a non-profit organisation explained her mentoring philosophy as follows: “One of my mentors early on talked about the need for a leader to be a ‘certain trumpet’. It comes from Corinthians, and it's a very good visualization -- if the trumpet isn't clear, who's going to follow you?” (Bryant, Zigzag BU.2).By comparison, we noted numerous instances in the NYT wherein mentors were present as characters, or archetypes, in film, performing arts, and television. Archetypes exhibit attributes, or convey meanings, that are instinctively understood by those who share common cultural, societal, or racial experiences (Lane 232) For example, a NYT film review of The Assassin states that “the title character [is] trained in her deadly vocation by a fierce, soft-spoken mentor” (Scott C.4). Such characterisations rely on audiences’ understanding of the inherentfunction of the mentor role, and, like metaphors, can help to convey that which is compelling or complex.Intentionality and TrustIn interviews, academics spoke of the time and trust required to develop mentoring relationships. One noted “It may take a bit of an effort... You don’t get to know a person very well just meeting three times during the year”. Another spoke of trust and comfort as defining these relationships: “You just open up. You feel immediately comfortable”. We also found evidence of trust and intentionality in NYT accounts of these relationships. Mentees were often portrayed as seeking out and relying on mentorship. A junior teacher stated that “she would lean on mentors at her new school. You are not on that island all alone” (Rich A1). In contrast, there were few explicit accounts of intentionality and reflection on the part of a mentor. In one instance, a police officer who participated in a mentorship program for street kids mused “it's not about the talent. It was just about the interaction”. In another, an actor described her mentoring experiences as follows: “You have to know when to give advice and when to just be quiet and listen...no matter how much you tell someone how it goes, no one really wants to listen. Their dreams are much bigger than whatever fear or whatever obstacle you say may be in their path” (Syme C.5).Many NYT articles present career mentoring as a role that can be assumed by anyone with requisite knowledge or experience. Indeed, some accounts of mentorship arguably more closely resembled role model relationships, wherein individuals are admired, typically from afar, and emulated by those who aspire to similar accomplishments. Here, there was little, if any, apparent awareness of the complexity or potential impact of these relationships. Rather, we observed a casualness, an almost striking superficiality, in some NYT accounts of mentoring relationships. Examples ranged from references to “sartorial mentors” (Pappu D1) to a professional coach who shared: “After being told by a mentor that her scowl was ‘setting her back’ at work, [she] began taking pictures of her face so she could try to look more cheerful” (Bennett ST.1).Trust, an essential component of mentorship, can wither when mentors occupy dual roles, such as that of mentor and supervisor, or engage in mentoring as a means of furthering their own interests. While some academic interviewees were mentored by past and current supervisors, none reported any instance of role conflict. However in the NYT, we identified multiple instances where mentorship programs intentionally, or unintentionally, inspired divided loyalties. At one academic institution, peer mentors were “encouraged to befriend and offer mentorship to the students on their floors, yet were designated ‘mandatory reporters’ of any incident that may violate the school policy” (Rosman ST.1). In another media story, government employees in a phased-retirement program received monetary incentives to mentor colleagues: “Federal workers who take phased retirement work 20 hours a week and agree to mentor other workers. During that time, they receive half their pay and half their retirement annuity payout. When workers retire completely, their annuities will include an increase to account for the part-time service” (Hannon B.1). More extreme depictions of conflict of interest were evident in other NYT reports of mentors and mentees competing for job promotions, and mentees accusing mentors of sexual harassment and rape; such examples underscore potential for abuse of trust in these relationships.Discussion/ConclusionsOur exploration of mentorship in the NYT suggests mentorship is embedded in our culture, and is a means by which we develop competencies required to integrate into, and function within, society. Whereas, traditionally, mentorship was an informal relationship that developed over time, we now see a wider array of mentorship models, including formal career and youth programs aimed at increasing access to mentorship, and mentor-for-hire arrangements in business and professional sports. Such formal programs can offer redress to those who lack informal mentorship opportunities, and increased initiatives of this sort are welcome.Although standards of reporting in news media surely account for some of the lack of detail in many NYT reports of mentorship, such brevity may also suggest that, while mentoring continues to grow in popularity, we may have compromised substance for availability. Considerations of the training, time, attention, and trust required of these relationships may have been short-changed, and the tendency we observed in the NYT to conflate role modeling and mentorship may contribute to depictions of mentorship as a quick fix, or ‘mentorship light’. Although mentorship continues to be lauded as a means of promoting personal and professional development, not all mentoring may be of similar quality, and not everyone has comparable access to these relationships. While we continue to honour the promise of mentorship, as with all things worth having, effective mentorship requires effort. This effort comes in the form of preparation, commitment or intentionality, and the development of bonds of trust within these relationships. In short, overuse of, over-reference to, and misapplication of the mentorship label may serve to dilute the significance and meaning of these relationships. Further, we acknowledge a darker side to mentorship, with the potential for abuses of power.Although we have reservations regarding some trends towards the casual usage of the mentorship term, we are also heartened by the apparent scope and reach of these relationships. Numerous individuals continue to draw comfort from advice, sponsorship, motivation, support and validation that mentors provide. Indeed, for many, mentorship may represent an essential lifeline to navigating life’s many challenges. We, thus, conclude that mentorship, in its many forms, is here to stay.ReferencesBennett, Jessica. "Cursed with a Death Stare." New York Times (East Coast) 2 Aug. 2015, late ed.: ST.1.Bryant, Adam. "Designate a Devil's Advocate." New York Times (East Coast) 9 Aug. 2015, late ed.: BU.2.Bryant, Adam. "The Power of Candid Questions." New York Times (East Coast) 16 Aug. 2015, late ed.: BU. 2.Bryant, Adam. "Zigzag Your Way to the Top." New York Times (East Coast) 13 Sept. 2015, late ed.: BU.2.DeMarco, Peter. "One Life, Shaken and Stirred." New York Times (East Coast) 23 Aug. 2015, late ed.: ST.6.DuBois, David L., Nelson Portillo, Jean E. Rhodes, Nadia Silverhorn and Jeffery C. Valentine. "How Effective Are Mentoring Programs for Youth? A Systematic Assessment of the Evidence." Psychological Science in the Public Interest 12.2 (2011): 57-91.Eby, Lillian T., Tammy D. Allen, Brian J. Hoffman, Lisa E. Baranik, …, and Sarah C. Evans. "An Interdisciplinary Meta-analysis of the Potential Antecedents, Correlates, and Consequences of Protégé Perceptions of Mentoring." Psychological Bulletin 139.2 (2013): 441-76.Gold, Sarah. "Preserving a Master's Vision of Sugar Plums." New York Times (East Coast) 6 Dec. 2015, late ed.: CT 11.Hannon, Kerry. "Retiring, But Not All at Once." New York Times (East Coast) 22 Aug. 2015, late ed.: B.1.Kourlas, Gia. "Marathon of a Milestone Tour." New York Times Late Edition (East Coast) 6 Sept. 2015: AR.7.Lane, Lauriat. "The Literary Archetype: Some Reconsiderations." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 13.2 (1954): 226-32.Levinson, Daniel. J. The Seasons of a Man's Life. New York: Ballantine, 1978.Merriam, Sharan. "Mentors and Protégés: A Critical Review of the Literature." Adult Education Quarterly 33.3 (1983): 161-73.Moynihan, Colin. "Man's Cooperation in Terrorist Cases Spares Him from Serving More Time in Prison." New York Times (East Coast) 24 Oct. 2015, late ed.: A.21.Pappu, Sridhar. "Tailored to the Spotlight." New York Times (East Coast) 27 Aug. 2015, late ed.: D1.Rich, Motoko. "Across Country, a Scramble Is On to Find Teachers." New York Times (East Coast) 10 Aug. 2015, late ed.: A1.Rosman, Katherine. "On the Campus Front Line." New York Times (East Coast) 27 Sept. 2015, late ed.: ST.1.Scott, AO. "The Delights to Be Found in a Deadly Vocation." New York Times (East Coast) 16 Oct. 2015, late ed.: C.4.Shpigel, Ben. "An Exchange of Respect in the Swapping of Jerseys." New York Times (East Coast) 18 Oct. 2015, late ed.: SP.1.Slaughter, Ann-Marie. "A Toxic Work World." New York Times (East Coast) 20 Sept. 2015, late ed.: SR.1.Syme, Rachel. "In TV, Finding a Creative Space with No Limitations." New York Times (East Coast) 26 Aug. 2015, late ed.: C.5.Trebay, Guy. "Remembering a Time When Fashion Shows Were Fun." New York Times (East Coast) 10 Sept. 2015, late ed.: D.8.World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. World Press Trends Report. Paris: WAN-IFRA, 2015.

Introduction In December 2010, Nespresso, the world’s leading brand of premium-portioned coffee, opened a flagship “boutique” in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall. This was Nespresso’s fifth boutique opening of 2010, after Brussels, Miami, Soho, and Munich. The Sydney debut coincided with the mall’s upmarket redevelopment, which explains Nespresso’s arrival in the city: strategic geographic expansion is key to the brand’s growth. Rather than panoramic ubiquity, a retail option favoured by brands like McDonalds, KFC and Starbucks, Nespresso opts for iconic, prestigious locations. This strategy has been highly successful: since 2000 Nespresso has recorded year-on-year per annum growth of 30 per cent. This has been achieved, moreover, despite a global financial downturn and an international coffee market replete with brand variety. In turn, Nespresso marks an evolution in the coffee market over the last decade. The Nespresso Story Founded in 1986, Nespresso is the fasting growing brand in the Nestlé Group. Its headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland, with over 7,000 employees worldwide. In 2012, Nespresso had 270 boutiques in 50 countries. The brand’s growth strategy involves three main components: premium coffee capsules, “mated” with specially designed machines, and accompanied by exceptional customer service through the Nespresso Club. Each component requires some explanation. Nespresso offers 16 varieties of Grand Crus coffee: 7 espresso blends, 3 pure origin espressos, 3 lungos (for larger cups), and 3 decaffeinated coffees. Each 5.5 grams of portioned coffee is cased in a hermetically sealed aluminium capsule, or pod, designed to preserve the complex, volatile aromas (between 800 and 900 per pod), and prevent oxidation. These capsules are designed to be used exclusively with Nespresso-branded machines, which are equipped with a patented high-pressure extraction system designed for optimum release of the coffee. These machines, of which there are 28 models, are developed with 6 machine partners, and Antoine Cahen, from Ateliers du Nord in Lausanne, designs most of them. For its consumers, members of the Nespresso Club, the capsules and machines guarantee perfect espresso coffee every time, within seconds and with minimum effort—what Nespresso calls the “ultimate coffee experience.” The Nespresso Club promotes this experience as an everyday luxury, whereby café-quality coffee can be enjoyed in the privacy and comfort of Club members’ homes. This domestic focus is a relatively recent turn in its history. Nestlé patented some of its pod technology in 1976; the compatible machines, initially made in Switzerland by Turmix, were developed a decade later. Nespresso S. A. was set up as a subsidiary unit within the Nestlé Group with a view to target the office and fine restaurant sector. It was first test-marketed in Japan in 1986, and rolled out the same year in Switzerland, France and Italy. However, by 1988, low sales prompted Nespresso’s newly appointed CEO, Jean-Paul Gillard, to rethink the brand’s focus. Gillard subsequently repositioned Nespresso’s target market away from the commercial sector towards high-income households and individuals, and introduced a mail-order distribution system; these elements became the hallmarks of the Nespresso Club (Markides 55). The Nespresso Club was designed to give members who had purchased Nespresso machines 24-hour customer service, by mail, phone, fax, and email. By the end of 1997 there were some 250,000 Club members worldwide. The boom in domestic, user-friendly espresso machines from the early 1990s helped Nespresso’s growth in this period. The cumulative efforts by the main manufacturers—Krups, Bosch, Braun, Saeco and DeLonghi—lowered the machines’ average price to around US $100 (Purpura, “Espresso” 88; Purpura, “New” 116). This paralleled consumers’ growing sophistication, as they became increasingly familiar with café-quality espresso, cappuccino and latté—for reasons to be detailed below. Nespresso was primed to exploit this cultural shift in the market and forge a charismatic point of difference: an aspirational, luxury option within an increasingly accessible and familiar field. Between 2006 and 2008, Nespresso sales more than doubled, prompting a second production factory to supplement the original plant in Avenches (Simonian). In 2008, Nespresso grew 20 times faster than the global coffee market (Reguly B1). As Nespresso sales exceeded $1.3 billion AU in 2009, with 4.8 billion capsules shipped out annually and 5 million Club members worldwide, it became Nestlé’s fastest growing division (Canning 28). According to Nespresso’s Oceania market director, Renaud Tinel, the brand now represents 8 per cent of the total coffee market; of Nespresso specifically, he reports that 10,000 cups (using one capsule per cup) were consumed worldwide each minute in 2009, and that increased to 12,300 cups per minute in 2010 (O’Brien 16). Given such growth in such a brief period, the atypical dynamic between the boutique, the Club and the Nespresso brand warrants closer consideration. Nespresso opened its first boutique in Paris in 2000, on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was a symbolic choice and signalled the brand’s preference for glamorous precincts in cosmopolitan cities. This has become the design template for all Nespresso boutiques, what the company calls “brand embassies” in its press releases. More like art gallery-style emporiums than retail spaces, these boutiques perform three main functions: they showcase Nespresso coffees, machines and accessories (all elegantly displayed); they enable Club members to stock up on capsules; and they offer excellent customer service, which invariably equates to detailed production information. The brand’s revenue model reflects the boutique’s role in the broader business strategy: 50 per cent of Nespresso’s business is generated online, 30 per cent through the boutiques, and 20 per cent through call centres. Whatever floor space these boutiques dedicate to coffee consumption is—compared to the emphasis on exhibition and ambience—minimal and marginal. In turn, this tightly monitored, self-focused model inverts the conventional function of most commercial coffee sites. For several hundred years, the café has fostered a convivial atmosphere, served consumers’ social inclinations, and overwhelmingly encouraged diverse, eclectic clientele. The Nespresso boutique is the antithesis to this, and instead actively limits interaction: the Club “community” does not meet as a community, and is united only in atomised allegiance to the Nespresso brand. In this regard, Nespresso stands in stark contrast to another coffee brand that has been highly successful in recent years—Starbucks. Starbucks famously recreates the aesthetics, rhetoric and atmosphere of the café as a “third place”—a term popularised by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe non-work, non-domestic spaces where patrons converge for respite or recreation. These liminal spaces (cafés, parks, hair salons, book stores and such locations) might be private, commercial sites, yet they provide opportunities for chance encounters, even therapeutic interactions. In this way, they aid sociability and civic life (Kleinman 193). Long before the term “third place” was coined, coffee houses were deemed exemplars of egalitarian social space. As Rudolf P. Gaudio notes, the early coffee houses of Western Europe, in Oxford and London in the mid-1600s, “were characterized as places where commoners and aristocrats could meet and socialize without regard to rank” (670). From this sanguine perspective, they both informed and animated the modern public sphere. That is, and following Habermas, as a place where a mixed cohort of individuals could meet and discuss matters of public importance, and where politics intersected society, the eighteenth-century British coffee house both typified and strengthened the public sphere (Karababa and Ger 746). Moreover, and even from their early Ottoman origins (Karababa and Ger), there has been an historical correlation between the coffee house and the cosmopolitan, with the latter at least partly defined in terms of demographic breadth (Luckins). Ironically, and insofar as Nespresso appeals to coffee-literate consumers, the brand owes much to Starbucks. In the two decades preceding Nespresso’s arrival, Starbucks played a significant role in refining coffee literacy around the world, gauging mass-market trends, and stirring consumer consciousness. For Nespresso, this constituted major preparatory phenomena, as its strategy (and success) since the early 2000s presupposed the coffee market that Starbucks had helped to create. According to Nespresso’s chief executive Richard Giradot, central to Nespresso’s expansion is a focus on particular cities and their coffee culture (Canning 28). In turn, it pays to take stock of how such cities developed a coffee culture amenable to Nespresso—and therein lays the brand’s debt to Starbucks. Until the last few years, and before celebrity ambassador George Clooney was enlisted in 2005, Nespresso’s marketing was driven primarily by Club members’ recommendations. At the same time, though, Nespresso insisted that Club members were coffee connoisseurs, whose knowledge and enjoyment of coffee exceeded conventional coffee offerings. In 2000, Henk Kwakman, one of Nestlé’s Coffee Specialists, explained the need for portioned coffee in terms of guaranteed perfection, one that demanding consumers would expect. “In general”, he reasoned, “people who really like espresso coffee are very much more quality driven. When you consider such an intense taste experience, the quality is very important. If the espresso is slightly off quality, the connoisseur notices this immediately” (quoted in Butler 50). What matters here is how this corps of connoisseurs grew to a scale big enough to sustain and strengthen the Nespresso system, in the absence of a robust marketing or educative drive by Nespresso (until very recently). Put simply, the brand’s ascent was aided by Starbucks, specifically by the latter’s success in changing the mainstream coffee market during the 1990s. In establishing such a strong transnational presence, Starbucks challenged smaller, competing brands to define themselves with more clarity and conviction. Indeed, working with data that identified just 200 freestanding coffee houses in the US prior to 1990 compared to 14,000 in 2003, Kjeldgaard and Ostberg go so far as to state that: “Put bluntly, in the US there was no local coffee consumptionscape prior to Starbucks” (Kjeldgaard and Ostberg 176). Starbucks effectively redefined the coffee world for mainstream consumers in ways that were directly beneficial for Nespresso. Starbucks: Coffee as Ambience, Experience, and Cultural Capital While visitors to Nespresso boutiques can sample the coffee, with highly trained baristas and staff on site to explain the Nespresso system, in the main there are few concessions to the conventional café experience. Primarily, these boutiques function as material spaces for existing Club members to stock up on capsules, and therefore they complement the Nespresso system with a suitably streamlined space: efficient, stylish and conspicuously upmarket. Outside at least one Sydney boutique for instance (Bondi Junction, in the fashionable eastern suburbs), visitors enter through a club-style cordon, something usually associated with exclusive bars or hotels. This demarcates the boutique from neighbouring coffee chains, and signals Nespresso’s claim to more privileged patrons. This strategy though, the cultivation of a particular customer through aesthetic design and subtle flattery, is not unique. For decades, Starbucks also contrived a “special” coffee experience. Moreover, while the Starbucks model strikes a very different sensorial chord to that of Nespresso (in terms of décor, target consumer and so on) it effectively groomed and prepped everyday coffee drinkers to a level of relative self-sufficiency and expertise—and therein is the link between Starbucks’s mass-marketed approach and Nespresso’s timely arrival. Starbucks opened its first store in 1971, in Seattle. Three partners founded it: Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, both teachers, and Gordon Bowker, a writer. In 1982, as they opened their sixth Seattle store, they were joined by Howard Schultz. Schultz’s trip to Italy the following year led to an entrepreneurial epiphany to which he now attributes Starbucks’s success. Inspired by how cafés in Italy, particularly the espresso bars in Milan, were vibrant social hubs, Schultz returned to the US with a newfound sensitivity to ambience and attitude. In 1987, Schultz bought Starbucks outright and stated his business philosophy thus: “We aren’t in the coffee business, serving people. We are in the people business, serving coffee” (quoted in Ruzich 432). This was articulated most clearly in how Schultz structured Starbucks as the ultimate “third place”, a welcoming amalgam of aromas, music, furniture, textures, literature and free WiFi. This transformed the café experience twofold. First, sensory overload masked the dull homogeny of a global chain with an air of warm, comforting domesticity—an inviting, everyday “home away from home.” To this end, in 1994, Schultz enlisted interior design “mastermind” Wright Massey; with his team of 45 designers, Massey created the chain’s decor blueprint, an “oasis for contemplation” (quoted in Scerri 60). At the same time though, and second, Starbucks promoted a revisionist, airbrushed version of how the coffee was produced. Patrons could see and smell the freshly roasted beans, and read about their places of origin in the free pamphlets. In this way, Starbucks merged the exotic and the cosmopolitan. The global supply chain underwent an image makeover, helped by a “new” vocabulary that familiarised its coffee drinkers with the diversity and complexity of coffee, and such terms as aroma, acidity, body and flavour. This strategy had a decisive impact on the coffee market, first in the US and then elsewhere: Starbucks oversaw a significant expansion in coffee consumption, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the decades following the Second World War, coffee consumption in the US reached a plateau. Moreover, as Steven Topik points out, the rise of this type of coffee connoisseurship actually coincided with declining per capita consumption of coffee in the US—so the social status attributed to specialised knowledge of coffee “saved” the market: “Coffee’s rise as a sign of distinction and connoisseurship meant its appeal was no longer just its photoactive role as a stimulant nor the democratic sociability of the coffee shop” (Topik 100). Starbucks’s singular triumph was to not only convert non-coffee drinkers, but also train them to a level of relative sophistication. The average “cup o’ Joe” thus gave way to the latte, cappuccino, macchiato and more, and a world of coffee hitherto beyond (perhaps above) the average American consumer became both regular and routine. By 2003, Starbucks’s revenue was US $4.1 billion, and by 2012 there were almost 20,000 stores in 58 countries. As an idealised “third place,” Starbucks functioned as a welcoming haven that flattened out and muted the realities of global trade. The variety of beans on offer (Arabica, Latin American, speciality single origin and so on) bespoke a generous and bountiful modernity; while brochures schooled patrons in the nuances of terroir, an appreciation for origin and distinctiveness that encoded cultural capital. This positioned Starbucks within a happy narrative of the coffee economy, and drew patrons into this story by flattering their consumer choices. Against the generic sameness of supermarket options, Starbucks promised distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, and diversity in its coffee offerings. For Greg Dickinson, the Starbucks experience—the scent of the beans, the sound of the grinders, the taste of the coffees—negated the abstractions of postmodern, global trade: by sensory seduction, patrons connected with something real, authentic and material. At the same time, Starbucks professed commitment to the “triple bottom line” (Savitz), the corporate mantra that has morphed into virtual orthodoxy over the last fifteen years. This was hardly surprising; companies that trade in food staples typically grown in developing regions (coffee, tea, sugar, and coffee) felt the “political-aesthetic problematization of food” (Sassatelli and Davolio). This saw increasingly cognisant consumers trying to reconcile the pleasures of consumption with environmental and human responsibilities. The “triple bottom line” approach, which ostensibly promotes best business practice for people, profits and the planet, was folded into Starbucks’s marketing. The company heavily promoted its range of civic engagement, such as donations to nurses’ associations, literacy programs, clean water programs, and fair dealings with its coffee growers in developing societies (Simon). This bode well for its target market. As Constance M. Ruch has argued, Starbucks sought the burgeoning and lucrative “bobo” class, a term Ruch borrows from David Brooks. A portmanteau of “bourgeois bohemians,” “bobo” describes the educated elite that seeks the ambience and experience of a counter-cultural aesthetic, but without the political commitment. Until the last few years, it seemed Starbucks had successfully grafted this cultural zeitgeist onto its “third place.” Ironically, the scale and scope of the brand’s success has meant that Starbucks’s claim to an ethical agenda draws frequent and often fierce attack. As a global behemoth, Starbucks evolved into an iconic symbol of advanced consumer culture. For those critical of how such brands overwhelm smaller, more local competition, the brand is now synonymous for insidious, unstoppable retail spread. This in turn renders Starbucks vulnerable to protests that, despite its gestures towards sustainability (human and environmental), and by virtue of its size, ubiquity and ultimately conservative philosophy, it has lost whatever cachet or charm it supposedly once had. As Bryant Simon argues, in co-opting the language of ethical practice within an ultimately corporatist context, Starbucks only ever appealed to a modest form of altruism; not just in terms of the funds committed to worthy causes, but also to move thorny issues to “the most non-contentious middle-ground,” lest conservative customers felt alienated (Simon 162). Yet, having flagged itself as an ethical brand, Starbucks became an even bigger target for anti-corporatist sentiment, and the charge that, as a multinational giant, it remained complicit in (and one of the biggest benefactors of) a starkly inequitable and asymmetric global trade. It remains a major presence in the world coffee market, and arguably the most famous of the coffee chains. Over the last decade though, the speed and intensity with which Nespresso has grown, coupled with its atypical approach to consumer engagement, suggests that, in terms of brand equity, it now offers a more compelling point of difference than Starbucks. Brand “Me” Insofar as the Nespresso system depends on a consumer market versed in the intricacies of quality coffee, Starbucks can be at least partly credited for nurturing a more refined palate amongst everyday coffee drinkers. Yet while Starbucks courted the “average” consumer in its quest for market control, saturating the suburban landscape with thousands of virtually indistinguishable stores, Nespresso marks a very different sensibility. Put simply, Nespresso inverts the logic of a coffee house as a “third place,” and patrons are drawn not to socialise and relax but to pursue their own highly individualised interests. The difference with Starbucks could not be starker. One visitor to the Bloomingdale boutique (in New York’s fashionable Soho district) described it as having “the feel of Switzerland rather than Seattle. Instead of velvet sofas and comfy music, it has hard surfaces, bright colours and European hostesses” (Gapper 9). By creating a system that narrows the gap between production and consumption, to the point where Nespresso boutiques advertise the coffee brand but do not promote on-site coffee drinking, the boutiques are blithely indifferent to the historical, romanticised image of the coffee house as a meeting place. The result is a coffee experience that exploits the sophistication and vanity of aspirational consumers, but ignores the socialising scaffold by which coffee houses historically and perhaps naively made some claim to community building. If anything, Nespresso restricts patrons’ contemplative field: they consider only their relationships to the brand. In turn, Nespresso offers the ultimate expression of contemporary consumer capitalism, a hyper-individual experience for a hyper-modern age. By developing a global brand that is both luxurious and niche, Nespresso became “the Louis Vuitton of coffee” (Betts 14). Where Starbucks pursued retail ubiquity, Nespresso targets affluent, upmarket cities. As chief executive Richard Giradot put it, with no hint of embarrassment or apology: “If you take China, for example, we are not speaking about China, we are speaking about Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing because you will not sell our concept in the middle of nowhere in China” (quoted in Canning 28). For this reason, while Europe accounts for 90 per cent of Nespresso sales (Betts 15), its forays into the Americas, Asia and Australasia invariably spotlights cities that are already iconic or emerging economic hubs. The first boutique in Latin America, for instance, was opened in Jardins, a wealthy suburb in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Nespresso, Nestlé has popularised a coffee experience neatly suited to contemporary consumer trends: Club members inhabit a branded world as hermetically sealed as the aluminium pods they purchase and consume. Besides the Club’s phone, fax and online distribution channels, pods can only be bought at the boutiques, which minimise even the potential for serendipitous mingling. The baristas are there primarily for product demonstrations, whilst highly trained staff recite the machines’ strengths (be they in design or utility), or information about the actual coffees. For Club members, the boutique service is merely the human extension of Nespresso’s online presence, whereby product information becomes increasingly tailored to increasingly individualised tastes. In the boutique, this emphasis on the individual is sold in terms of elegance, expedience and privilege. Nespresso boasts that over 70 per cent of its workforce is “customer facing,” sharing their passion and knowledge with Club members. Having already received and processed the product information (through the website, boutique staff, and promotional brochures), Club members need not do anything more than purchase their pods. In some of the more recently opened boutiques, such as in Paris-Madeleine, there is even an Exclusive Room where only Club members may enter—curious tourists (or potential members) are kept out. Club members though can select their preferred Grands Crus and checkout automatically, thanks to RFID (radio frequency identification) technology inserted in the capsule sleeves. So, where Starbucks exudes an inclusive, hearth-like hospitality, the Nespresso Club appears more like a pampered clique, albeit a growing one. As described in the Financial Times, “combine the reception desk of a designer hotel with an expensive fashion display and you get some idea what a Nespresso ‘coffee boutique’ is like” (Wiggins and Simonian 10). Conclusion Instead of sociability, Nespresso puts a premium on exclusivity and the knowledge gained through that exclusive experience. The more Club members know about the coffee, the faster and more individualised (and “therefore” better) the transaction they have with the Nespresso brand. This in turn confirms Zygmunt Bauman’s contention that, in a consumer society, being free to choose requires competence: “Freedom to choose does not mean that all choices are right—there are good and bad choices, better and worse choices. The kind of choice eventually made is the evidence of competence or its lack” (Bauman 43-44). Consumption here becomes an endless process of self-fashioning through commodities; a process Eva Illouz considers “all the more strenuous when the market recruits the consumer through the sysiphian exercise of his/her freedom to choose who he/she is” (Illouz 392). In a status-based setting, the more finely graded the differences between commodities (various places of origin, blends, intensities, and so on), the harder the consumer works to stay ahead—which means to be sufficiently informed. Consumers are locked in a game of constant reassurance, to show upward mobility to both themselves and society. For all that, and like Starbucks, Nespresso shows some signs of corporate social responsibility. In 2009, the company announced its “Ecolaboration” initiative, a series of eco-friendly targets for 2013. By then, Nespresso aims to: source 80 per cent of its coffee through Sustainable Quality Programs and Rainforest Alliance Certified farms; triple its capacity to recycle used capsules to 75 per cent; and reduce the overall carbon footprint required to produce each cup of Nespresso by 20 per cent (Nespresso). This information is conveyed through the brand’s website, press releases and brochures. However, since such endeavours are now de rigueur for many brands, it does not register as particularly innovative, progressive or challenging: it is an unexceptional (even expected) part of contemporary mainstream marketing. Indeed, the use of actor George Clooney as Nespresso’s brand ambassador since 2005 shows shrewd appraisal of consumers’ political and cultural sensibilities. As a celebrity who splits his time between Hollywood and Lake Como in Italy, Clooney embodies the glamorous, cosmopolitan lifestyle that Nespresso signifies. However, as an actor famous for backing political and humanitarian causes (having raised awareness for crises in Darfur and Haiti, and backing calls for the legalisation of same-sex marriage), Clooney’s meanings extend beyond cinema: as a celebrity, he is multi-coded. Through its association with Clooney, and his fusion of star power and worldly sophistication, the brand is imbued with semantic latitude. Still, in the television commercials in which Clooney appears for Nespresso, his role as the Hollywood heartthrob invariably overshadows that of the political campaigner. These commercials actually pivot on Clooney’s romantic appeal, an appeal which is ironically upstaged in the commercials by something even more seductive: Nespresso coffee. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Collateral Casualties of Consumerism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7.1 (2007): 25–56. Betts, Paul. “Nestlé Refines its Arsenal in the Luxury Coffee War.” Financial Times 28 Apr. (2010): 14. Bourdieu, Pierre. 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In the 2019 documentary Chasing Happiness, recording artist/musician Joe Jonas tells audiences that the band was “living the dream”. Similarly, in the 2012 documentary Artifact, lead singer Jared Leto remarks that at the height of Thirty Seconds to Mars’s success, they “were living the dream”. However, for both the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, their experiences of the music industry (much like other commercially successful recording artists) soon transformed into nightmares. Similar to other commercially successful recording artists, the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, came up against the constraints of the industry which inevitably led to a forfeiting of authenticity, a loss of creative control, increased exploitation, and unequal remuneration. This work will consider how working in the music industry is not always a dream come true and can instead be viewed as a proverbial nightmare. Living the DreamIn his book Dreams, Carl Gustav Jung discusses how that which is experienced in sleep, speaks of a person’s wishes: that which might be desired in reality but may not actually happen. In his earlier work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that the dream is representative of fulfilling a repressed wish. However, the creative industries suggest that a dream need not be a repressed wish; it can become a reality. Jon Bon Jovi believes that his success in the music industry has surpassed his wildest dreams (Atkinson). Jennifer Lopez considers the fact that she held big dreams, had a focussed passion, and strong aspirations the reason why she pursued a creative career that took her out of the Bronx (Thomas). In a Twitter post from 23 April 2018, Bruno Mars declared that he “use [sic] to dream of this shit,” in referring to a picture of him performing for a sold out arena, while in 2019 Shawn Mendes informed his 24.4 million Twitter followers that his “life is a dream”. These are but a few examples of successful music industry artists who are seeing their ‘wishes’ come true and living the American Dream.Endemic to the American culture (and a characteristic of the identity of the country) is the “American Dream”. It centres on “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability and achievement” (Adams, 404). Although initially used to describe having a nice house, money, stability and a reasonable standard of living, the American Dream has since evolved to what the scholar Florida believes is the new ‘aspiration of people’: doing work that is enjoyable and relies on human creativity. At its core, the original American Dream required striving to meet individual goals, and was promoted as possible for anyone regardless of their cultural, socio-economic and political background (Samuel), because it encourages the celebrating of the self and personal uniqueness (Gamson). Florida’s conceptualisation of the New American dream, however, tends to emphasise obtaining success, fame and fortune in what Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin (310) consider “hot”, “creative” industries where “the jobs are cool”.Whether old or new, the American Dream has perpetuated and reinforced celebrity culture, with many of the young generation reporting that fame and fortune were their priorities, as they sought to emulate the success of their famous role models (Florida). The rag to riches stories of iconic recording artists can inevitably glorify and make appealing the struggle that permits achieving one’s dream, with celebrities offering young, aspiring creative people a means of identification for helping them to aspire to meet their dreams (Florida; Samuel). For example, a young Demi Lovato spoke of how she idolised and looked up to singer Beyonce Knowles, describing Knowles as a role model because of the way she carries herself (Tishgart). Similarly, American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson cited Aretha Franklin as her musical inspiration and the reason that she sings from a place deep within (Nilles). It is unsurprising then, that popular media has tended to portray artists working in the creative industries and being paid to follow their passions as “a much-vaunted career dream” (Duffy and Wissinger, 4656). Movies such as A Star Is Born (2018), The Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Dreamgirls (2006), Begin Again (2013) and La La Land (2016) exalt the perception that creativity, talent, sacrifice and determination will mean dreams come true (Nicolaou). In concert with the American dream is the drive among creative people pursuing creative success to achieve their dreams because of the perceived autonomy they will gain, the chance of self-actualisation and social rewards, and the opportunity to fulfil intrinsic motivations (Amabile; Auger and Woodman; Cohen). For these workers, the love of creation and the happiness that accompanies new discoveries (Csikszentmihalyi) can offset the tight budgets and timelines, precarious labour (Blair, Grey, and Randle; Hesmondhalgh and Baker), uncertain demand (Caves; Shultz), sacrifice of personal relationships (Eikhof and Haunschild), the demand for high quality products (Gil & Spiller), and the tense relationships with administrators (Bilton) which are known to plague these industries. In some cases, young, up and coming creative people overlook these pitfalls, instead romanticising creative careers as ideal and worthwhile. They willingly take on roles and cede control to big corporations to “realize their passions [and] uncover their personal talent” (Bill, 50). Of course, as Ursell argues in discussing television employees, such idealisation can mean creatives, especially those who are young and unfamiliar with the constraints of the industry, end up immersed in and victims of the “vampiric” industry that exploits workers (816). They are socialised towards believing, in this case, that the record label is a necessary component to obtain fame and fortune and whether willing or unwilling, creative workers become complicit in their own exploitation (Cohen). Loss of Control and No CompensationThe music industry itself has been considered by some to typify the cultural industries (Chambers). Popular music has potency in that it is perceived as speaking a universal language (Burnett), engaging the emotions and thoughts of listeners, and assisting in their identity construction (Burnett; Gardikiotis and Baltzis). Given the place of music within society, it is not surprising that in 2018, the global music industry was worth US$19.1billion (IFPI). The music industry is necessarily underpinned by a commercial agenda. At present, six major recording companies exist and between them, they own between 70-80 per cent of the recordings produced globally (Konsor). They also act as gatekeepers, setting trends by defining what and who is worth following and listening to (Csikszentmihalyi; Jones, Anand, and Alvarez). In essence, to be successful in the music industry is to be affiliated with a record label. This is because the highly competitive nature and cluttered environment makes it harder to gain traction in the market without worthwhile representation (Moiso and Rockman). In the 2012 documentary about Thirty Seconds to Mars, Artifact, front man Jared Leto even questions whether it is possible to have “success without a label”. The recording company, he determines, “deal with the crappy jobs”. In a financially uncertain industry that makes money from subjective or experience-based goods (Caves), having a label affords an artist access to “economic capital for production and promotion” that enables “wider recognition” of creative work (Scott, 239). With the support of a record label, creative entrepreneurs are given the chance to be promoted and distributed in the creative marketplace (Scott; Shultz). To have a record label, then, is to be perceived as legitimate and credible (Shultz).However, the commercial music industry is just that, commercial. Accordingly, the desire to make money can see the intrinsic desires of musicians forfeited in favour of standardised products and a lack of remuneration for artists (Negus). To see this standardisation in practice, one need not look further than those contestants appearing on shows such as American Idol or The Voice. Nowhere is the standardisation of the music industry more evident than in Holmes’s 2004 article on Pop Idol. Pop Idol first aired in Britain from 2001-2003 and paved the way for a slew of similar shows around the world such as Australia’s Popstars Live in 2004 and the global Idol phenomena. According to Holmes, audiences are divested of the illusion of talent and stardom when they witness the obvious manufacturing of musical talent. The contestants receive training, are dressed according to a prescribed image, and the show emphasises those melodramatic moments that are commercially enticing to audiences. Her sentiments suggest these shows emphasise the artifice of the music industry by undermining artistic authenticity in favour of generating celebrities. The standardisation is typified in the post Idol careers of Kelly Clarkson and Adam Lambert. Kelly Clarkson parted with the recording company RCA when her manager and producer Clive Davis told her that her album My December (2007) was “not commercial enough” and that Clarkson, who had written most of the songs, was a “shitty writer… who should just shut up and sing” (Nied). Adam Lambert left RCA because they wanted him to make a full length 80s album comprised of covers. Lambert commented that, “while there are lots of great songs from that decade, my heart is simply not in doing a covers album” (Lee). In these instances, winning the show and signing contracts led to both Clarkson and Lambert forfeiting a degree of creative control over their work in favour of formulaic songs that ultimately left both artists unsatisfied. The standardisation and lack of remuneration is notable when signing recording artists to 360° contracts. These 360° contracts have become commonplace in the music industry (Gulchardaz, Bach, and Penin) and see both the material and immaterial labour (such as personal identities) of recording artists become controlled by record labels (Stahl and Meier). These labels determine the aesthetics of the musicians as well as where and how frequently they tour. Furthermore, the labels become owners of any intellectual property generated by an artist during the tenure of the contract (Sanders; Stahl and Meier). For example, in their documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of (2015), the Backstreet Boys lament their affiliation with manager Lou Pearlman. Not only did Pearlman manufacture the group in a way that prevented creative exploration by the members (Sanders), but he withheld profits to the point that the Backstreet Boys had to sue Pearlman in order to gain access to money they deserved. In 2002 the members of the Backstreet Boys had stated that “it wasn’t our destinies that we had to worry about in the past, it was our souls” (Sanders, 541). They were not writing their own music, which came across in the documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of when singer Howie Dorough demanded that if they were to collaborate as a group again in 2013, that everything was to be produced, managed and created by the five group members. Such a demand speaks to creative individuals being tied to their work both personally and emotionally (Bain). The angst encountered by music artists also signals the identity dissonance and conflict felt when they are betraying their true or authentic creative selves (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey). Performing and abiding by the rules and regulations of others led to frustration because the members felt they were “being passed off as something we aren’t” (Sanders 539). The Backstreet Boys were not the only musicians who were intensely controlled and not adequately compensated by Pearlman. In the documentary The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story 2019, Lance Bass of N*Sync and recording artist Aaron Carter admitted that the experience of working with Pearlman became a nightmare when they too, were receiving cheques that were so small that Bass describes them as making his heart sink. For these groups, the dream of making music was undone by contracts that stifled creativity and paid a pittance.In a similar vein, Thirty Seconds to Mars sought to cut ties with their record label when they felt that they were not being adequately compensated for their work. In retaliation EMI issued Mars with a US$30 million lawsuit for breach of contract. The tense renegotiations that followed took a toll on the creative drive of the group. At one point in the documentary Artifact (2012), Leto claims “I can’t sing it right now… You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to sing this song the way it needs to be sung right now. I’m not ready”. The contract subordination (Phillips; Stahl and Meier) that had led to the need to renegotiate financial terms came at not only a financial cost to the band, but also a physical and emotional one. The negativity impacted the development of the songs for the new album. To make music requires evoking necessary and appropriate emotions in the recording studio (Wood, Duffy, and Smith), so Leto being unable to deliver the song proved problematic. Essentially, the stress of the lawsuit and negotiations damaged the motivation of the band (Amabile; Elsbach and Hargadon; Hallowell) and interfered with their creative approach, which could have produced standardised and poor quality work (Farr and Ford). The dream of making music was almost lost because of the EMI lawsuit. Young creatives often lack bargaining power when entering into contracts with corporations, which can prove disadvantaging when it comes to retaining control over their lives (Phillips; Stahl and Meier). Singer Demi Lovato’s big break came in the 2008 Disney film Camp Rock. As her then manager Phil McIntyre states in the documentary Simply Complicated (2017), Camp Rock was “perceived as the vehicle to becoming a superstar … overnight she became a household name”. However, as “authentic and believable” as Lovato’s edginess appeared, the speed with which her success came took a toll on Lovato. The pressure she experienced having to tour, write songs that were approved by others, star in Disney channel shows and movies, and look a certain way, became too much and to compensate, Lovato engaged in regular drug use to feel free. Accordingly, she developed a hybrid identity to ensure that the squeaky clean image required by the moral clauses of her contract, was not tarnished by her out-of-control lifestyle. The nightmare came from becoming famous at a young age and not being able to handle the expectations that accompanied it, coupled with a stringent contract that exploited her creative talent. Lovato’s is not a unique story. Research has found that musicians are more inclined than those in other workforces to use psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs (Vaag, Bjørngaard, and Bjerkeset) and that fame and money can provide musicians more opportunities to take risks, including drug-use that leads to mortality (Bellis, Hughes, Sharples, Hennell, and Hardcastle). For Lovato, living the dream at a young age ultimately became overwhelming with drugs her only means of escape. AuthenticityThe challenges then for music artists is that the dream of pursuing music can come at the cost of a musician’s authentic self. According to Hughes, “to be authentic is to be in some sense real and true to something ... It is not simply an imitation, but it is sincere, real, true, and original expression of its creator, and is believable or credible representations or example of what it appears to be” (190). For Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, being in the spotlight and abiding by the demands of Disney was “non-stop” and prevented his personal and musical growth (Chasing Happiness). As Kevin Jonas put it, Nick “wanted the Jonas Brothers to be no more”. The extensive promotion that accompanies success and fame, which is designed to drive celebrity culture and financial motivations (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King), can lead to cynical performances and dissatisfaction (Hughes) if the identity work of the creative creates a disjoin between their perceived self and aspirational self (Beech, Gilmore, Cochrane, and Greig). Promoting the band (and having to film a television show and movies he was not invested in all because of contractual obligations) impacted on Nick’s authentic self to the point that the Jonas Brothers made him feel deeply upset and anxious. For Nick, being stifled creatively led to feeling inauthentic, thereby resulting in the demise of the band as his only recourse.In her documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two (2017), Lady Gaga discusses the extent she had to go to maintain a sense of authenticity in response to producer control. As she puts it, “when producers wanted me to be sexy, I always put some absurd spin on it, that made me feel like I was still in control”. Her words reaffirm the perception amongst scholars (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King; Meyers) that in playing the information game, industry leaders will construct an artist’s persona in ways that are most beneficial for, in this case, the record label. That will mean, for example, establishing a coherent life story for musicians that endears them to audiences and engaging recording artists in co-branding opportunities to raise their profile and to legitimise them in the marketplace. Such behaviour can potentially influence the preferences and purchases of audiences and fans, can create favourability, originality and clarity around artists (Loroz and Braig), and can establish competitive advantage that leads to producers being able to charge higher prices for the artists’ work (Hernando and Campo). But what impact does that have on the musician? Lady Gaga could not continue living someone else’s dream. She found herself needing to make changes in order to avoid quitting music altogether. As Gaga told a class of university students at the Emotion Revolution Summit hosted by Yale University:I don’t like being used to make people money. It feels sad when I am overworked and that I have just become a money-making machine and that my passion and creativity take a backseat. That makes me unhappy.According to Eikof and Haunschild, economic necessity can threaten creative motivation. Gaga’s reaction to the commercial demands of the music industry signal an identity conflict because her desire to create, clashed with the need to be commercial, with the outcome imposing “inconsistent demands upon” her (Ashforth and Mael, 29). Therefore, to reduce what could be considered feelings of dissonance and inconsistency (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey) Gaga started saying “no” to prevent further loss of her identity and sense of authentic self. Taking back control could be seen as a means of reorienting her dream and overcoming what had become dissatisfaction with the commercial processes of the music industry. ConclusionsFor many creatives working in the creative industries – and specifically the music industry – is constructed as a dream come true; the working conditions and expectations experienced by recording artists are far from liberating and instead can become nightmares to which they want to escape. The case studies above, although likely ‘constructed’ retellings of the unfortunate circumstances encountered working in the music industry, nevertheless offer an inside account that contradicts the prevailing ideology that pursuing creative passions leads to a dream career (Florida; Samuel). If anything, the case studies explored above involving 30 Seconds to Mars, the Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Adam Lambert and the Backstreet Boys, acknowledge what many scholars writing in the creative industries have already identified; that exploitation, subordination, identity conflict and loss of control are the unspoken or lesser known consequences of pursuing the creative dream. That said, the conundrum for creatives is that for success in the industry big “creative” businesses, such as recording labels, are still considered necessary in order to break into the market and to have prolonged success. This is simply because their resources far exceed those at the disposal of independent and up-and-coming creative entrepreneurs. Therefore, it can be argued that this friction of need between creative industry business versus artists will be on-going leading to more of these ‘dream to nightmare’ stories. The struggle will continue manifesting in the relationship between business and artist for long as the recording artists fight for greater equality, independence of creativity and respect for their work, image and identities. 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On 19 January 1975, Australia’s first youth station 2JJ (Double Jay) launched itself onto the nation’s airwaves with a NASA-style countdown and You Only Like Me ‘Cause I’m Good in Bed by Australian band Skyhooks. Refused airtime by the commercial stations because of its explicit sexual content, this song was a clear signifier of the new station’s intent—to occupy a more radical territory on Australian radio. Indeed, Double Jay’s musical entrée into the highly restrictive local broadcasting environment of the time has gone on to symbolise both the station’s role in its early days as an enfant terrible of radio (Inglis 376), and its near 40 years as a voice for youth culture in Australia (Milesago, Double Jay). In this paper we explore the proposition that Double Jay functioned as an outlet for youth counterculture in Australia, and that it achieved this even with (and arguably because of) its credentials as a state-generated entity. This proposition is considered via brief analysis of the political and musical context leading to the establishment of Double Jay. We intend to demonstrate that although the station was deeply embedded in “the system” in material and cultural terms, it simultaneously existed in an “uneasy symbiosis” (Martin and Siehl 54) with this system because it consciously railed against the mainstream cultures from which it drew, providing a public and active vehicle for youth counterculture in Australia. The origins of Double Jay thus provide one example of the complicated relationship between culture and counterculture, and the multiple ways in which the two are inextricably linked. As a publicly-funded broadcasting station Double Jay was liberated from the industrial imperatives of Australia’s commercial stations which arguably drove their predisposition for formula. The absence of profit motive gave Double Jay’s organisers greater room to experiment with format and content, and thus the potential to create a genuine alternative in Australia broadcasting. As a youth station Double Jay was created to provide a minority with its own outlet. The Labor government committed to wrenching airspace from the very restrictive Australian broadcasting “system” (Wiltshire and Stokes 2) to provide minority voices with room to speak and to be heard. Youth was identified by the government as one such minority. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) contributed to this process by enabling young staffers to establish the semi-independent Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) (Webb) and within this a youth station. Not only did this provide a focal point around which a youth collective could coalesce, but the distinct place and identity of Double Jay within the ABC offered its organisers the opportunity to ignore or indeed subvert some of the perceived strictures of the “mothership” that was the ABC, whether in organisational, content and/or stylistic terms. For these and other reasons Double Jay was arguably well positioned to counter the broadcasting cultures that existed alongside this station. It did so stylistically, and also in more fundamental ways, At the same time, however, it “pillaged the host body at random” (Webb) co-opting certain aspects of these cultures (people, scheduling, content, administration) which in turn implicated Double Jay in the material and cultural practices of those mainstream cultures against which it railed. Counterculture on the Airwaves: Space for Youth to Play? Before exploring these themes further, we should make clear that Double Jay’s legitimacy as a “counterculture” organisation is observably tenuous against the more extreme renderings of the concept. Theodore Roszak, for example, requires of counterculture something “so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all” (5). Double Jay was a brainchild of the state: an outcome of the Whitlam Government’s efforts to open up the nation’s airwaves (Davis, Government; McClelland). Further, the supervision of this station was given to the publicly funded Australian national broadcaster, the ABC (Inglis). Any claim Double Jay has to counterculture status then is arguably located in less radical invocations of the term. Some definitions, for example, hold that counterculture contains value systems that run counter to culture, but these values are relational rather than divorced from each other. Kenneth Leech, for example, states that counterculture is "a way of life and philosophy which at central points is in conflict with the mainstream society” (Desmond et al. 245, our emphasis); E.D. Batzell defines counterculture as "a minority culture marked by a set of values, norms and behaviour patterns which contradict those of the dominant society" (116, our emphasis). Both definitions imply that counterculture requires the mainstream to make sense of what it is doing and why. In simple terms then, counterculture as the ‘other’ does not exist without its mainstream counterpoint. The particular values with which counterculture is in conflict are generated by “the system” (Heath and Potter 6)—a system that imbues “manufactured needs and mass-produced desires” (Frank 15) in the masses to encourage order, conformity and consumption. Counterculture seeks to challenge this “system” via individualist, expression-oriented values such as difference, diversity, change, egalitarianism, and spontaneity (Davis On Youth; Leary; Thompson and Coskuner‐Balli). It is these kinds of counterculture values that we demonstrate were embedded in the content, style and management practices within Double Jay. The Whitlam Years and the Birth of Double Jay Double Jay was borne of the Whitlam government’s brief but impactful period in office from 1972 to 1975, after 23 years of conservative government in Australia. Key to the Labor Party’s election platform was the principle of participatory democracy, the purpose of which was “breaking down apathy and maximising active citizen engagement” (Cunningham 123). Within this framework, the Labor Party committed to opening the airwaves, and reconfiguring the rhetoric of communication and media as a space of and for the people (Department of the Media 3). Labor planned to honour this commitment via sweeping reforms that would counter the heavily concentrated Australian media landscape through “the encouragement of diversification of ownership of commercial radio and television”—and in doing so enable “the expression of a plurality of viewpoints and cultures throughout the media” (Department of the Media 3). Minority groups in particular were to be privileged, while some in the Party even argued for voices that would actively agitate. Senator Jim McClelland, for one, declared, “We say that somewhere in the system there must be broadcasting which not only must not be afraid to be controversial but has a duty to be controversial” (Senate Standing Committee 4). One clear voice of controversy to emerge in the 1960s and resonate throughout the 1970s was the voice of youth (Gerster and Bassett; Langley). Indeed, counterculture is considered by some as synonymous with a particular strain of youth culture during this time (Roszak; Leech). The Labor Government acknowledged this hitherto unrecognised voice in its 1972 platform, with Minister for the Media Senator Doug McClelland claiming that his party would encourage the “whetting of the appetite” for “life and experimentation” of Australia’s youth – in particular through support for the arts (160). McClelland secured licenses for two “experimental-type” stations under the auspices of the ABC, with the youth station destined for Sydney via the ABC’s standby transmitter in Gore Hill (ABCB, 2). Just as the political context in early 1970s Australia provided the necessary conditions for the appearance of Double Jay, so too did the cultural context. Counterculture emerged in the UK, USA and Europe as a clear and potent force in the late 1960s (Roszak; Leech; Frank; Braunstein and Doyle). In Australia this manifested in the 1960s and 1970s in various ways, including political protest (Langley; Horne); battles for the liberalisation of censorship (Hope and Dickerson, Liberalisation; Chipp and Larkin); sex and drugs (Dawson); and the art film scene (Hope and Dickerson, Happiness; Thoms). Of particular interest here is the “lifestyle” aspect of counterculture, within which the value-expressions against the dominant culture manifest in cultural products and practices (Bloodworth 304; Leary ix), and more specifically, music. Many authors have suggested that music was pivotal to counterculture (Bloodworth 309; Leech 8), a key “social force” through which the values of counterculture were articulated (Whiteley 1). The youth music broadcasting scene in Australia was extremely narrow prior to Double Jay, monopolised by a handful of media proprietors who maintained a stranglehold over the youth music scene from the mid-50s. This dominance was in part fuelled by the rising profitability of pop music, driven by “the dreamy teenage market”, whose spending was purely discretionary (Doherty 52) and whose underdeveloped tastes made them “immune to any sophisticated disdain of run-of-the-mill” cultural products (Doherty 230-231). Over the course of the 1950s the commercial stations pursued this market by “skewing” their programs toward the youth demographic (Griffen-Foley 264). The growing popularity of pop music saw radio shift from a “multidimensional” to “mono-dimensional” medium according to rock journalist Bruce Elder, in which the “lowest-common-denominator formula of pop song-chat-commercial-pop-song” dominated the commercial music stations (12). Emblematic of this mono-dimensionalism was the appearance of the Top 40 Playlist in 1958 (Griffin-Foley 265), which might see as few as 10–15 songs in rotation in peak shifts. Elder claims that this trend became more pronounced over the course of the 1960s and peaked in 1970, with playlists that were controlled with almost mechanical precision [and] compiled according to American-devised market research methods which tended to reinforce repetition and familiarity at the expense of novelty and diversity. (12) Colin Vercoe, whose job was to sell the music catalogues of Festival Records to stations like 2UE, 2SER and SUW, says it was “an incredibly frustrating affair” to market new releases because of the rigid attachment by commercials to the “Top 40 of endless repeats” (Vercoe). While some air time was given to youth music beyond the Top 40, this happened mostly in non-peak shifts and on weekends. Bill Drake at 2SM (who was poached by Double Jay and allowed to reclaim his real name, Holger Brockmann) played non-Top 40 music in his Sunday afternoon programme The Album Show (Brockmann). A more notable exception was Chris Winter’s Room to Move on the ABC, considered by many as the predecessor of Double Jay. Introduced in 1971, Room to Move played all forms of contemporary music not represented by the commercial broadcasters, including whole albums and B sides. Rock music’s isolation to the fringes was exacerbated by the lack of musical sales outlets for rock and other forms of non-pop music, with much music sourced through catalogues, music magazines and word of mouth (Winter; Walker). In this context a small number of independent record stores, like Anthem Records in Sydney and Archie and Jugheads in Melbourne, appear in the early 1970s. Vercoe claims that the commercial record companies relentlessly pursued the closure of these independents on the grounds they were illegal entities: The record companies hated them and they did everything they could do close them down. When (the companies) bought the catalogue to overseas music, they bought the rights. And they thought these record stores were impinging on their rights. It was clear that a niche market existed for rock and alternative forms of music. Keith Glass and David Pepperell from Archie and Jugheads realised this when stock sold out in the first week of trade. Pepperell notes, “We had some feeling we were doing something new relating to people our own age but little idea of the forces we were about to unleash”. Challenging the “System” from the Inside At the same time as interested individuals clamoured to buy from independent record stores, the nation’s first youth radio station was being instituted within the ABC. In October 1974, three young staffers—Marius Webb, Ron Moss and Chris Winter— with the requisite youth credentials were briefed by ABC executives to build a youth-style station for launch in January 1975. According to Winter “All they said was 'We want you to set up a station for young people' and that was it!”, leaving the three with a conceptual carte blanche–although assumedly within the working parameters of the ABC (Webb). A Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) was formed in order to meet the requirements of the ABC while also creating a clear distinction between the youth station and the ABC. According to Webb “the CRU gave us a lot of latitude […] we didn’t have to go to other ABC Departments to do things”. The CRU was conscious from the outset of positioning itself against the mainstream practices of both the commercial stations and the ABC. The publicly funded status of Double Jay freed it from the shackles of profit motive that enslaved the commercial stations, in turn liberating its turntables from baser capitalist imperatives. The two coordinators Ron Moss and Marius Webb also bypassed the conventions of typecasting the announcer line-up (as was practice in both commercial and ABC radio), seeking instead people with charisma, individual style and youth appeal. Webb told the Sydney Morning Herald that Double Jay’s announcers were “not required to have a frontal lobotomy before they go on air.” In line with the individual- and expression-oriented character of the counterculture lifestyle, it was made clear that “real people” with “individuality and personality” would fill the airwaves of Double Jay (Nicklin 9). The only formula to which the station held was to avoid (almost) all formula – a mantra enhanced by the purchase in the station’s early days of thousands of albums and singles from 10 or so years of back catalogues (Robinson). This library provided presenters with the capacity to circumvent any need for repetition. According to Winter the DJs “just played whatever we wanted”, from B sides to whole albums of music, most of which had never made it onto Australian radio. The station also adapted the ABC tradition of recording live classical music, but instead recorded open-air rock concerts and pub gigs. A recording van built from second-hand ABC equipment captured the grit of Sydney’s live music scene for Double Jay, and in so doing undercut the polished sounds of its commercial counterparts (Walker). Double Jay’s counterculture tendencies further extended to its management style. The station’s more political agitators, led by Webb, sought to subvert the traditional top-down organisational model in favour of a more egalitarian one, including a battle with the ABC to remove the bureaucratic distinction between technical staff and presenters and replace this with the single category “producer/presenter” (Cheney, Webb, Davis 41). The coordinators also actively subverted their own positions as coordinators by holding leaderless meetings open to all Double Jay employees – meetings that were infamously long and fraught, but also remembered as symbolic of the station’s vibe at that time (Frolows, Matchett). While Double Jay assumed the ABC’s focus on music, news and comedy, at times it politicised the content contra to the ABC’s non-partisan policy, ignored ABC policy and practice, and more frequently pushed its contents over the edges of what was considered propriety and taste. These trends were already present in pockets of the ABC prior to Double Jay: in current affairs programmes like This Day Tonight and Four Corners (Harding 49); and in overtly leftist figures like Alan Ashbolt (Bowman), who it should be noted had a profound influence over Webb and other Double Jay staff (Webb). However, such an approach to radio still remained on the edges of the ABC. As one example of Double Jay’s singularity, Webb made clear that the ABC’s “gentleman’s agreement” with the Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters to ban certain content from airplay would not apply to Double Jay because the station would not “impose any censorship on our people” – a fact demonstrated by the station’s launch song (Nicklin 9). The station’s “people” in turn made the most of this freedom with the production of programmes like Gayle Austin’s Horny Radio Porn Show, the Naked Vicar Show, the adventures of Colonel Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, and the Sunday afternoon comic improvisations of Nude Radio from the team that made Aunty Jack. This openness also made its way into the news team, most famously in its second month on air with the production of The Ins and Outs of Love, a candid documentary of the sexual proclivities and encounters of Sydney’s youth. Conservative ABC staffer Clement Semmler described the programme as containing such “disgustingly explicit accounts of the sexual behaviour of young teenagers” that it “aroused almost universal obloquy from listeners and the press” (35). The playlist, announcers, comedy sketches, news reporting and management style of Double Jay represented direct challenges to the entrenched media culture of Australia in the mid 1970s. The Australian National Commission for UNESCO noted at the time that Double Jay was “variously described as political, subversive, offensive, pornographic, radical, revolutionary and obscene” (7). While these terms were understandable given the station’s commitment to experiment and innovation, the “vital point” about Double Jay was that it “transmitted an electronic reflection of change”: What the station did was to zero in on the kind of questioning of traditional values now inherent in a significant section of the under 30s population. It played their music, talked in their jargon, pandered to their whims, tastes, prejudices and societal conflicts both intrinsic and extrinsic. (48) Conclusion From the outset, Double Jay was locked in an “uneasy symbiosis” with mainstream culture. On the one hand, the station was established by federal government and its infrastructure was provided by state funds. It also drew on elements of mainstream broadcasting in multiple ways. However, at the same time, it was a voice for and active agent of counterculture, representing through its content, form and style those values that were considered to challenge the ‘system,’ in turn creating an outlet for the expression of hitherto un-broadcast “ways of thinking and being” (Leary). As Henry Rosenbloom, press secretary to then Labor Minister Dr Moss Cass wrote, Double Jay had the potential to free its audience “from an automatic acceptance of the artificial rhythms of urban and suburban life. 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This article aims to throw new light on the representation of women who cook as necessarily perpetuating a domestic ideology in which women are confined to the home. Traditionally, cookbooks written by women have disseminated both cooking information and rules and practices for running an effective household, which have contributed to the ideologies that underpin female domestic practice. However, the evolution of social media platforms, such as Pinterest, which enable the user to actively select and visually display culinary masterpieces on a digital pinboard, have provided a forum for women’s voices and a novel means of expression that is available to the amateur cook and professional chef alike. This article will argue that the creation of a virtual cookbook, via Pinterest, is a means of empowering women, which is central to the lexicon of feminist debate. Rather than being the victims of domestic servitude, this article will argue that the women who create virtual cookbooks do so by choice, and as a means of pleasing the self, irrespective of achieving domestic or marital bliss. Cookbooks “provide a range of insights into everyday life, such as attitudes towards food, domestic economy and the roles of women” (Wessell and Wishart 1). The proliferation of the cooking industry in the form of television programs, celebrity chefs, and social media channels seemingly devoted to the display of culinary artefacts, has transformed what was once a domestic chore into a professional practice. Traditionally, cookbooks that contained information on both the preparation and cooking of food and advice on how to run an effective household were more like guidebooks for women on how to achieve domestic and marital happiness. According to Jenny Lawson, well-known and highly acclaimed cookbooks such as Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management were published as a reaction against eating-out, which was drawing men away from the home. “This aligned a cultural expectation of female domestic servitude with gaining the love and respect of a male partner” (Lawson 348) and reinforced the now familiar proverb that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. More recently, How to be a Domestic Goddess highlights the distance between feminism and cooking (Lawson). The book, according to Joanne Hollows, equates baking with a false consciousness and suggests that baking is not far removed from domestic enslavement. This conceptualisation of the-woman-in-the-kitchen is intimately bound to the views of second-wave feminists who believe that cooking is a sign of traditional femininity, which is at odds with a feminist identity (Ashley et al.). This argument situates cooking and food within debates about the sexual division of labour and positions women as providers of food for others. “Women frequently use food to offer pleasure to family members, yet have difficulty experiencing food as pleasurable themselves, particularly in a domestic context” (Hollows 184). Anne Murcott’s It’s a Pleasure to Cook for Him argues that the choice of what to cook and eat is invariably done in the service of some others. Marjorie DeVault similarly asserts that it is the relationship between cooking and caring that cements the relationship between cooking and femininity, while Charles and Kerr conclude that because women fear gaining weight, they deprive themselves of pleasure and so prepare food for others to give pleasure. Women fundamentally cook to please, and please men in particular (Charles and Kerr). For Charles and Kerr, the pleasure that women get from cooking for men is a by-product of the pleasure they receive from caring for others. The notion that women cook out of a desire to care for others is an argument left over from the patrilineal delineations outlined in Biblical texts. Western civilisation has drawn its leading metaphors and definitions of gender from the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis. As a result of the Fall, which proceeded Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, the sexual division of labour emerged. Adam was instructed to work, and Eve was punished with the pain of childbearing and motherhood. Traditionalist assumptions posited that the assignment of different tasks and roles to men and women was evidence of the naturalness of their respective responsibilities. This explanation focused on women’s reproductive capacity and reiterated motherhood—central to which was an obligation to care for and nurture others—as a woman’s chief goal, which was necessary for the continued promulgation of the species (Lerner). In the nineteenth century, the credibility of this argument was questioned and a scientific explanation was used to justify patriarchy and women’s place within the home. Darwinian theories continued to define women according to their maternal role and justified their exclusion from economic and educational opportunities on the grounds that this was in the best interests of the survival of the species (Lerner). This contributed to the prevailing “cult of domesticity” that was the hallmark of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. According to this ideological position, true women were supposed to devote themselves to unpaid domestic labour and refrain from paid work. Each of these positions served to reinforce women’s responsibility within the home and, for centuries, women have participated in their own subordination by internalising the proscriptive belief that they exist solely to propagate the human race. If caring and nurturing others is the condition on which cooking is deemed to be “feminine”, then cooking to please oneself should negate the argument that cooking is a “feminine” activity. This article will suggest that the creation of virtual cookbooks on Pinterest enables women to resist societies continued attempts at defining femininity in increasingly restrictive ways. It will be argued that women who create virtual cookbooks do so by choice and as a means of pleasing the self. The representation of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson will be used to elucidate the reconceptualisation of cooking as a pleasurable activity. She is able to distinguish between leisure time and work-related culinary activity and, in so doing, she is represented as enjoying cooking in and of itself, not as a domestic responsibility. Building on this notion of cooking as pleasure, it will be argued that women who create virtual cookbooks on Pinterest do so by choice, for both personal and professional reasons, and irrespective of a desire to please others. Whilst Pinterest has raised significant debate as to whether or not it actually perpetuates gender stereotypes traditionally associated with cooking and femininity, this article will suggest that the desire to cook and a belief in equal rights for women are not mutually exclusive. For the purpose of this article, feminism and contemporary femininity are articulated around the idea of choice. Women are not choosing to create virtual cookbooks on Pinterest for the benefit of men. They are choosing to embrace this platform and are using it as a means of creative expression and an outlet of empowerment that transforms cooking from a domestic chore into an activity with public significance. This “promotes a new female relationship with food, enabling the other sides of femininity, those subversive, darker, abject possibilities to surface” (Lawson, Food Legacies 361), which ultimately grants women moments of agency and transcendence through cooking. Nigella Lawson, who cooks out of a desire for solitary pleasure, epitomises the changing nature of the cookbook throughout the last century. In Feast, she advocates the need for self-satisfaction and independence: “At its most basic, perhaps, is the quiet satisfaction of knowing one is fending for oneself, the instrument of one’s own survival” (4). According to Elisabeth Nathanson, “thinking about cooking as personally satisfying, rather than as a task associated with taking care of one’s family, denotes a new articulation of contemporary femininity” (318). For the purpose of this article then, feminism simply refers to the notion of choice and pleasing the self. Cooking is no longer an activity conducted solely by women in the privacy of their own home, for the purpose of caring for others. Female celebrity chefs, such as Nigella Lawson, draw attention to a particular ethos of pleasing the self as opposed to others. According to Jenny Lawson, Nigella Lawson renegotiates her cooking duties for her own cause (Food Legacies). She disrupts notions of female care and responsibility by “embracing self-satisfaction and indulgence” (Lawson, Disturbing 82) and, in this way, she negotiates a feminine identity that “hovers between the polarised figures of ‘the feminist’ and ‘the housewife’” (Hollows 180). According to Hollows, Nigella Lawson’s work offers an alternative way of imagining women’s relationship to food, which is based on the pleasure of cooking and eating, rather than pleasing others. The Nigella Lawson cooking philosophy posits that cooking should be pleasurable and should start from a desire to eat. Lawson is represented as aware of what she wants to eat and she does not defer to the preferences of others. She separates cooking from the notion of “cooking for”, which allows us to appreciate cooking as a pleasure in, and of, itself. It should be noted, however, that Nigella Lawson is a successful businesswoman who has made her success from her status as a woman-in-the-kitchen. Her programs are carefully constructed to show her prioritising leisure time and cooking to please the self (Lawson, Food Legacies). Although Lawson has encouraged women to cook to please, this is not the sole reason why she cooks. Her brand identity depends on her appearing as though she cooks for pleasure and yet she is undoubtedly, at least in part, driven by economic motivations. Although the cookbooks of the past have promoted a particular lifestyle for other women to emulate (Lawson, Disturbing), they nevertheless represented elements of the private sphere where women were able to wield authority and bequeath their knowledge to other women (Theophano). Throughout history, Janet Theophano notes, women have shared their prize recipes as a vehicle for making themselves visible. As early as the eighteenth century, cookbooks were a way for women to gain economic independence and authority. The formation of cookbooks provided women with an opportunity to enter the professional domain of culinary writing, which served to remove cooking from domestic life. Flora Pell’s Our Cookery Book, first published in 1916, blurred the boundary between the notion of private and public spheres. Pell advocated that a woman’s place was in the home and she upheld socially conservative gender roles and yet she was, paradoxically, a career woman who remained unmarried until she was sixty years old (Wessell and Wishart). Pell’s cookbook reinforced stereotypes of the woman-in-the-kitchen and domestic goddess, whose primary occupation in life was to please others and men in particular. The emergence of Pinterest in 2010, however, a virtual platform that enables the user to post and share images of whatever they choose, has further transformed cooking from a “chore without glamour or choice” (Wessell and Brien 87) into an optional, albeit pleasurable, form of play. This innovative platform has opened up new possibilities for users, more than 70 per cent of whom are women, to find novel means of personal expression via the creation of virtual cookbooks. Pinterest has been self-defined as a space that is perfect for recipe sharing, which is not dissimilar to the practice of compiling family recipes into a book and cutting and pasting extracts from a magazine into one’s own personal collection. Pinterest, however, enables the user to share this collection with others and transforms what has been seen as a private practice into a public activity. Pinterest has transformed the creation of a personal recipe collection from a domestic chore into a commercial venture, which is evident when scrolling through endless pins promoting catering businesses and cake-baking services. Pinterest is, potentially, a great tool for enhancing and even structuring the user’s culinary dreams. The platform has not been without its critics who are polarized, between those who believe that women who use this tool to curate digital recipe collections are in some way undoing or even killing feminism by pinning images that reinforce stereotypes of femininity, and those who believe that because women are pinning these images by choice, it defies traditional notions of femininity previously attached to cooking. The former view posits that female users of Pinterest are pinning images that are aligned with the “traditional” woman, such as cooking, do-it-yourself home-wares and crafts, rather than the “modern” woman who does not want to be seen as different from a man. Advocates of Pinterest, in contrast, argue that the platform is a natural path for reform, noting, in particular, the increased opportunity it provides women for voice and creative expression. This latter position supports the central premise of this article, which suggests that a woman can have both an interest in cooking and a belief in equal rights for women. In the words of Antonia Hayes “we have the luxury of choosing what sort of woman we want to be, including the freedom to be both a feminist and a connoisseur of cauliflower pizzas” (online). Pinterest celebrates the fact that there is no right or wrong way to be a woman. As a platform, Pinterest allows women to rewrite the meanings that have been assigned to them as passive individuals, devoid of a voice, and provides women with the opportunity for expression through the self-publication of digital cookbooks. In Amy Odell’s How Pinterest is Killing Feminism, she labels Pinterest “the Mormon housewife’s image bookmarking service of choice”, which creates a “Stepford Wife” version of identity that is hollow and uncreative. Odell argues that the user-generated content, which is made up predominantly of recipes, home décor, fitness, and fashion, is evidence that women are conditioned to “seek out the retrograde, materialistic content that women’s magazines have been hawking for decades” (online). She further asserts that, “adult women are still conditioned to think about diet and exercise and looking beautiful … so it makes sense that they’d pin these things” (online). She takes particular issue with the diet recipes on Pinterest, such as low-carbohydrate pizza crusts made with crumbed cauliflower, which she argues are indicative of women’s internalised belief that they must be thin in order to be beautiful. This is an image that she argues is synonymous with women’s magazines and Pinterest alike, which she sees as being similarly inundated with images of unrealistic body types. The difference, however, which Odell overlooks, is that the content on Pinterest does not bombard us like a magazine or billboard. The content on Pinterest is user-generated; it is uploaded by our fellow Pinterest users. Women are curating their own experience on the site. They are not victims but actors. Odell’s stance is the antithesis of a feminist argument as it makes women the victims of the media. In order to buy into her argument, you have to assume that all female Pinterest users are one dimensional and easily led, which hardly sounds like a powerful feminist position. Odell’s argument also neglects the role played by male chefs, such as Jamie Oliver, whose recipe books are attempting to curb the obesity epidemic, by focusing on quick and easy meals that are also nutritionally beneficial, hence their respective titles underlining that they are “30-minute” and “15-minute meals”. Given that the latter involves the atempted preparation of an entire meal in 15-minutes, you can rest assured that you will be eating salads that can easily be tossed together in this stringent time frame, rather than sweets and treats. That being said, no one is accusing Oliver of being a victim of the media’s unrealistic portrayal of the human body simply because he advocates the cooking of healthy recipes. This begs the question as to why women who pin healthy recipes, such as cauliflower pizza crusts, and create virtual cookbooks are necessarily victims of the unattainable body syndrome. Odell suggests that cooking and feminism are mutually exclusive and she makes the uncomfortable suggestion that by pinning diet recipes that perpetuate negative body image, and posting and disseminating pretty pictures of culinary delights, women are, as the title of her post suggests, killing feminism. Odell’s diatribe is being met with fierce opposition by Pinterest users who identify as post-feminists. Post-feminists posit that gender equality has been achieved and that women are free to choose their lifestyles in both public and private worlds (Nathanson). This article builds on the premise that pinners perform post-feminism and that women curate visual manifestations of their capacity to “have-it-all”; choice, empowerment and licensed transgression. Nathan Jurgenson, the author of “Pinterest and Feminism” argues that Pinterest is giving women what they want, which is the whole point. In the same way that Nigella Lawson cooks out of a desire for solitary pleasure, women are using Pinterest as a form of leisure time entertainment that is separate from work time. The creation of virtual cookbooks on Pinterest is a pastime that women engage in selfishly. It is an escape from their domestic responsibilities because it is something that they do for themselves and no one else. Amelia McDonnell acknowledges that she wants to spend time drooling over a recipe that she intends to make on the weekend and invites Odell to share the pork chops she made—the recipe for which she found on Pinterest and cooked for herself because she is single and happy. Her satirical response to Odell reinforces the notion of self-satisfaction and independence that accompanies cooking. Like Nigella Lawson, who promotes a fantasy of domestic pleasure on her own terms, both women renegotiate what it means to be a public woman disseminating cooking practices (Lawson, Food Legacies). Antonia Hayes rejects Odell’s premise that Pinterest is killing feminism and accuses the latter of perpetuating the sexism that continues to pervade society. Hayes acknowledges that you can have an interest in cooking and interior design, whilst simultaneously espousing beliefs in equal rights for women: “Kitchen porn and feminism aren’t mutually exclusive” (online). As a self-proclaimed feminist and Pinterest user, with an ever-expanding virtual cookbook, it is easy to resent Odell’s remark that pinning photos of cauliflower crust pizzas is setting the women’s movement back decades. As Hayes asserts “it’s just as damaging to tell women that they’re killing feminism by liking pretty pictures as it is to tell them that in order to be feminine you must dress, act, look a certain way. It’s the same constructed view albeit from a different angle” (online). Self-proclaimed feminists like Odell, who tell us that “only a certain kind of woman (the Pinterest-rejecting, domesticity hater) deserves equal rights and respect” (online), are actually perpetuating the sexism that they are trying to combat. In so doing, they pose questions about notions of agency, choice and desire, which speak to longstanding debates and dilemmas in feminist theory.Since when did it become anti-feminist to like something that is visually pleasing? I have a Pinterest account and I am a feminist. However, if recent criticism on Pinterest is to be believed, these two things are antithetical. If traditional femininity posits that women should be passive, submissive, and silent, then the very nature of Pinterest, which requires the user to actively choose, post, and share images with others, is the very antithesis of these traits. Pinterest users, who create virtual cookbooks out of a desire to please the self, irrespective of any domestic obligations, are active, dominant and communicative. Women are choosing to publish cookbooks in their leisure time, which stands in direct to contrast to the productive demands of work time. Pinterest, a platform renowned for its capacity to render even the most productive individuals into serial procrastinators and time wasters, is the epitome of a leisure time activity. Rather than cooking for their husbands and children, as is their “heaven-appointed mission,” according to Flora Pell, women are scrolling through pins, creating a virtual cookbook of the culinary delights that they will make for themselves to enjoy.ReferencesAshley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Charles, Nickie, and Marrion Kerr. Women, Food and Families: Power, Status, Love, Anger. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988. DeVault, Marjorie. Feeding the Family: The Social Organisation of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. Hayes, Antonio. “Pinterest and the Modern Feminist.” 2012. 5 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/life/7803000/Pinterest-and-the-modern-feminist› Hollows, Joanne. “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess: Post-feminism and Cooking.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 179–202. Jurgenson, Nathan. “Pinterest and Feminism.” The Society Pages. 5 Mar. 2012. 25 Mar. 2013 ‹http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/03/05/pinterest-and-feminism› Lawson, Jenny. “Disturbing Objects: Making, Eating and Watching Food in Popular Culture And Performance Practice.” Platform 3.2 (2008): 79–99. Lawson, Jenny. “Food Legacies: Playing the Culinary Feminine.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 21.3 (2011): 337–66. Lawson, Nigella. How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Lawson, Nigella Feast: Food to Celebrate Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. London: Oxford UP, 1986. McDonnell, Amelia. “The Soapbox: Oh Please, Pinterest Isn’t ‘Killing’ Feminism.” 2 Oct. 2012. 28 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.thefrisky.com/2012-10-02/the-soapbox-oh-please-pinterest-isnt-killing-feminism› Murcott, Anne. It’s A Pleasure To Cook For Him: Food, Mealtimes and Gender In Some South Wales Households. London: Heinemann, 1983. Nathanson, Elizabeth. “As Easy As Pie: Cooking Shows, Domestic Efficiency and Postfeminist Temporality.” Television and New Media 10.4 (2009): 311–30. Odell, Amy. “How Pinterest is Killing Feminism.” 2012. 19 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyodell/how-pinterest-is-killing-feminism›. Oliver, Jamie. Jamie's 30-Minute Meals. London: Michael Joseph, 2010. ---. Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals. London: Michael Joseph, 2012. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Wessell, Adele, and Wishart, Alison. “Recipes for Reading Culinary Heritage: Flora Pell and Her Cookery Book.” reCollections 1.5 (2010): 1–19. 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Introduction Documentary film has grown significantly in the past decade, with high profile films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, and An Inconvenient Truth garnering increased attention both at the box office and in the news media. In addition, the rising prominence of web-based media has provided new opportunities for documentary to create social impact. Films are now typically released with websites, Facebook pages, twitter feeds, and web videos to increase both reach and impact. This combination of technology and broader audience appeal has given rise to a current landscape in which documentary films are imbedded within coordinated multi-media campaigns. New media have not only opened up new avenues for communicating with audiences, they have also created new opportunities for data collection and analysis of film impacts. A recent report by McKinsey and Company highlighted this potential, introducing and discussing the implications of increasing consumer information being recorded on the Internet as well as through networked sensors in the physical world. As they found: "Big data—large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed—is now part of every sector and function of the global economy" (Manyika et al. iv). This data can be mined to learn a great deal about both individual and cultural response to documentary films and the issues they represent. Although film has a rich history in humanities research, this new set of tools enables an empirical approach grounded in the social sciences. However, several researchers across disciplines have noted that limited investigation has been conducted in this area. Although there has always been an emphasis on social impact in film and many filmmakers and scholars have made legitimate (and possibly illegitimate) claims of impact, few have attempted to empirically justify these claims. Over fifteen years ago, noted film scholar Brian Winston commented that "the underlying assumption of most social documentaries—that they shall act as agents of reform and change—is almost never demonstrated" (236). A decade later, Political Scientist David Whiteman repeated this sentiment, arguing that, "despite widespread speculation about the impact of documentaries, the topic has received relatively little systematic attention" ("Evolving"). And earlier this year, the introduction to a special issue of Mass Communication and Society on documentary film stated, "documentary film, despite its growing influence and many impacts, has mostly been overlooked by social scientists studying the media and communication" (Nisbet and Aufderheide 451). Film has been studied extensively as entertainment, as narrative, and as cultural event, but the study of film as an agent of social change is still in its infancy. This paper introduces a systematic approach to measuring the social impact of documentary film aiming to: (1) discuss the context of documentary film and its potential impact; and (2) argue for a social science approach, discussing key issues about conducting such research. Changes in Documentary Practice Documentary film has been used as a tool for promoting social change throughout its history. John Grierson, who coined the term "documentary" in 1926, believed it could be used to influence the ideas and actions of people in ways once reserved for church and school. He presented his thoughts on this emerging genre in his 1932 essay, First Principles of Documentary, saying, "We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form" (97). Richard Barsam further specified the definition of documentary, distinguishing it from non-fiction film, such that all documentaries are non-fiction films but not all non-fiction films are documentaries. He distinguishes documentary from other forms of non-fiction film (i.e. travel films, educational films, newsreels) by its purpose; it is a film with an opinion and a specific message that aims to persuade or influence the audience. And Bill Nichols writes that the definition of documentary may even expand beyond the film itself, defining it as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" (12). Documentary film has undergone many significant changes since its inception, from the heavily staged romanticism movement of the 1920s to the propagandist tradition of governments using film to persuade individuals to support national agendas to the introduction of cinéma vérité in the 1960s and historical documentary in the 1980s (cf. Barnouw). However, the recent upsurge in popularity of documentary media, combined with technological advances of internet and computers have opened up a whole new set of opportunities for film to serve as both art and agent for social change. One such opportunity is in the creation of film-based social action campaigns. Over the past decade, filmmakers have taken a more active role in promoting social change by coordinating film releases with action campaigns. Companies such as Participant Media (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., etc.) now create "specific social action campaigns for each film and documentary designed to give a voice to issues that resonate in the films" (Participant Media). In addition, a new sector of "social media" consultants are now offering services, including "consultation, strategic planning for alternative distribution, website and social media development, and complete campaign management services to filmmakers to ensure the content of nonfiction media truly meets the intention for change" (Working Films). The emergence of new forms of media and technology are changing our conceptions of both documentary film and social action. Technologies such as podcasts, video blogs, internet radio, social media and network applications, and collaborative web editing "both unsettle and extend concepts and assumptions at the heart of 'documentary' as a practice and as an idea" (Ellsworth). In the past decade, we have seen new forms of documentary creation, distribution, marketing, and engagement. Likewise, film campaigns are utilizing a broad array of strategies to engage audience members, including "action kits, screening programs, educational curriculums and classes, house parties, seminars, panels" that often turn into "ongoing 'legacy' programs that are updated and revised to continue beyond the film's domestic and international theatrical, DVD and television windows" (Participant Media). This move towards multi-media documentary film is becoming not only commonplace, but expected as a part of filmmaking. NYU film professor and documentary film pioneer George Stoney recently noted, "50 percent of the documentary filmmaker's job is making the movie, and 50 percent is figuring out what its impact can be and how it can move audiences to action" (qtd. in Nisbet, "Gasland"). In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins, coined the term "transmedia storytelling", which he later defined as "a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience" ("Transmedia"). When applied to documentary film, it is the elements of the "issue" raised by the film that get dispersed across these channels, coordinating, not just an entertainment experience, but a social action campaign. Dimensions of Evaluation It is not unreasonable to assume that such film campaigns, just like any policy or program, have the possibility to influence viewers' knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Measuring this impact has become increasingly important, as funders of documentary and issue-based films want look to understand the "return on investment" of films in terms of social impact so that they can compare them with other projects, including non-media, direct service projects. Although we "feel" like films make a difference to the individuals who also see them in the broader cultures in which they are embedded, measurement and empirical analysis of this impact are vitally important for both providing feedback to filmmakers and funders as well as informing future efforts attempting to leverage film for social change. This type of systematic assessment, or program evaluation, is often discussed in terms of two primary goals—formative (or process) and summative (or impact) evaluation (cf. Muraskin; Trochim and Donnelly). Formative evaluation studies program materials and activities to strengthen a program, and summative evaluation examines program outcomes. In terms of documentary film, these two goals can be described as follows: Formative Evaluation: Informing the Process As programs (broadly defined as an intentional set of activities with the aim of having some specific impact), the people who interact with them, and the cultures they are situated in are constantly changing, program development and evaluation is an ongoing learning cycle. Film campaigns, which are an intentional set of activities with the aim of impacting individual viewers and broader cultures, fit squarely within this purview. Without formulating hypotheses about the relationships between program activities and goals and then collecting and analyzing data during implementation to test them, it is difficult to learn ways to improve programs (or continue doing what works best in the most efficient manner). Attention to this process enables those involved to learn more about, not only what works, but how and why it works and even gain insights about how program outcomes may be affected by changes to resource availability, potential audiences, or infrastructure. Filmmakers are constantly learning and honing their craft and realizing the impact of their practice can help the artistic process. Often faced with tight budgets and timelines, they are forced to confront tradeoffs all the time, in the writing, production and post-production process. Understanding where they are having impact can improve their decision-making, which can help both the individual project and the overall field. Summative Evaluation: Quantifying Impacts Evaluation is used in many different fields to determine whether programs are achieving their intended goals and objectives. It became popular in the 1960s as a way of understanding the impact of the Great Society programs and has continued to grow since that time (Madaus and Stufflebeam). A recent White House memo stated that "rigorous, independent program evaluations can be a key resource in determining whether government programs are achieving their intended outcomes as well as possible and at the lowest possible cost" and the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) launched an initiative to increase the practice of "impact evaluations, or evaluations aimed at determining the causal effects of programs" (Orszag 1). Documentary films, like government programs, generally target a national audience, aim to serve a social purpose, and often do not provide a return on their investment. Participant Media, the most visible and arguably most successful documentary production company in the film industry, made recent headlines for its difficulty in making a profit during its seven-year history (Cieply). Owner and founder Jeff Skoll reported investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the company and CEO James Berk added that the company sometimes measures success, not by profit, but by "whether Mr. Skoll could have exerted more impact simply by spending his money philanthropically" (Cieply). Because of this, documentary projects often rely on grant funding, and are starting to approach funders beyond traditional arts and media sources. "Filmmakers are finding new fiscal and non-fiscal partners, in constituencies that would not traditionally be considered—or consider themselves—media funders or partners" (BRITDOC 6). And funders increasingly expect tangible data about their return on investment. Says Luis Ubiñas, president of Ford Foundation, which recently launched the Just Films Initiative: In these times of global economic uncertainty, with increasing demand for limited philanthropic dollars, assessing our effectiveness is more important than ever. Today, staying on the frontlines of social change means gauging, with thoughtfulness and rigor, the immediate and distant outcomes of our funding. Establishing the need for evaluation is not enough—attention to methodology is also critical. Valid research methodology is a critical component of understanding around the role entertainment can play in impacting social and environmental issues. The following issues are vital to measuring impact. Defining the Project Though this may seem like an obvious step, it is essential to determine the nature of the project so one can create research questions and hypotheses based on a complete understanding of the "treatment". One organization that provides a great example of the integration of documentary film imbedded into a larger campaign or movement is Invisible Children. Founded in 2005, Invisible Children is both a media-based organization as well as an economic development NGO with the goal of raising awareness and meeting the needs of child soldiers and other youth suffering as a result of the ongoing war in northern Uganda. Although Invisible Children began as a documentary film, it has grown into a large non-profit organization with an operating budget of over $8 million and a staff of over a hundred employees and interns throughout the year as well as volunteers in all 50 states and several countries. Invisible Children programming includes films, events, fundraising campaigns, contests, social media platforms, blogs, videos, two national "tours" per year, merchandise, and even a 650-person three-day youth summit in August 2011 called The Fourth Estate. Individually, each of these components might lead to specific outcomes; collectively, they might lead to others. In order to properly assess impacts of the film "project", it is important to take all of these components into consideration and think about who they may impact and how. This informs the research questions, hypotheses, and methods used in evaluation. Film campaigns may even include partnerships with existing social movements and non-profit organizations targeting social change. The American University Center for Social Media concluded in a case study of three issue-based documentary film campaigns: Digital technologies do not replace, but are closely entwined with, longstanding on-the-ground activities of stakeholders and citizens working for social change. Projects like these forge new tools, pipelines, and circuits of circulation in a multiplatform media environment. They help to create sustainable network infrastructures for participatory public media that extend from local communities to transnational circuits and from grassroots communities to policy makers. (Abrash) Expanding the Focus of Impact beyond the Individual A recent focus has shifted the dialogue on film impact. Whiteman ("Theaters") argues that traditional metrics of film "success" tend to focus on studio economic indicators that are far more relevant to large budget films. Current efforts focused on box office receipts and audience size, the author claims, are really measures of successful film marketing or promotion, missing the mark when it comes to understanding social impact. He instead stresses the importance of developing a more comprehensive model. His "coalition model" broadens the range and types of impact of film beyond traditional metrics to include the entire filmmaking process, from production to distribution. Whiteman (“Theaters”) argues that a narrow focus on the size of the audience for a film, its box office receipts, and viewers' attitudes does not incorporate the potential reach of a documentary film. Impacts within the coalition model include both individual and policy levels. Individual impacts (with an emphasis on activist groups) include educating members, mobilizing for action, and raising group status; policy includes altering both agenda for and the substance of policy deliberations. The Fledgling Fund (Barrett and Leddy) expanded on this concept and identified five distinct impacts of documentary film campaigns. These potential impacts expand from individual viewers to groups, movements, and eventually to what they call the "ultimate goal" of social change. Each is introduced briefly below. Quality Film. The film itself can be presented as a quality film or media project, creating enjoyment or evoking emotion in the part of audiences. "By this we mean a film that has a compelling narrative that draws viewers in and can engage them in the issue and illustrate complex problems in ways that statistics cannot" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Awareness. Film can increase public awareness by bringing light to issues and stories that may have otherwise been unknown or not often thought about. This is the level of impact that has received the most attention, as films are often discussed in terms of their "educational" value. "A project's ability to raise awareness around a particular issue, since awareness is a critical building block for both individual change and broader social change" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Engagement. Impact, however, need not stop at simply raising public awareness. Engagement "indicates a shift from simply being aware of an issue to acting on this awareness. Were a film and its outreach campaign able to provide an answer to the question 'What can I do?' and more importantly mobilize that individual to act?" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This is where an associated film campaign becomes increasingly important, as transmedia outlets such as Facebook, websites, blogs, etc. can build off the interest and awareness developed through watching a film and provide outlets for viewers channel their constructive efforts. Social Movement. In addition to impacts on individuals, films can also serve to mobilize groups focused on a particular problem. The filmmaker can create a campaign around the film to promote its goals and/or work with existing groups focused on a particular issue, so that the film can be used as a tool for mobilization and collaboration. "Moving beyond measures of impact as they relate to individual awareness and engagement, we look at the project's impact as it relates to the broader social movement … if a project can strengthen the work of key advocacy organizations that have strong commitment to the issues raised in the film" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). Social Change. The final level of impact and "ultimate goal" of an issue-based film is long-term and systemic social change. "While we understand that realizing social change is often a long and complex process, we do believe it is possible and that for some projects and issues there are key indicators of success" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This can take the form of policy or legislative change, passed through film-based lobbying efforts, or shifts in public dialogue and behavior. Legislative change typically takes place beyond the social movement stage, when there is enough support to pressure legislators to change or create policy. Film-inspired activism has been seen in issues ranging from environmental causes such as agriculture (Food Inc.) and toxic products (Blue Vinyl) to social causes such as foreign conflict (Invisible Children) and education (Waiting for Superman). Documentary films can also have a strong influence as media agenda-setters, as films provide dramatic "news pegs" for journalists seeking to either sustain or generation new coverage of an issue (Nisbet "Introduction" 5), such as the media coverage of climate change in conjunction with An Inconvenient Truth. Barrett and Leddy, however, note that not all films target all five impacts and that different films may lead to different impacts. "In some cases we could look to key legislative or policy changes that were driven by, or at least supported by the project... In other cases, we can point to shifts in public dialogue and how issues are framed and discussed" (7). It is possible that specific film and/or campaign characteristics may lead to different impacts; this is a nascent area for research and one with great promise for both practical and theoretical utility. Innovations in Tools and Methods Finally, the selection of tools is a vital component for assessing impact and the new media landscape is enabling innovations in the methods and strategies for program evaluation. Whereas the traditional domain of film impact measurement included box office statistics, focus groups, and exit surveys, innovations in data collection and analysis have expanded the reach of what questions we can ask and how we are able to answer them. For example, press coverage can assist in understanding and measuring the increase in awareness about an issue post-release. Looking directly at web-traffic changes "enables the creation of an information-seeking curve that can define the parameters of a teachable moment" (Hart and Leiserowitz 360). Audience reception can be measured, not only via interviews and focus groups, but also through content and sentiment analysis of web content and online analytics. "Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden" (Manyika et al. 5). These new tools are significantly changing evaluation, expanding what we can learn about the social impacts of film through triangulation of self-report data with measurement of actual behavior in virtual environments. Conclusion The changing media landscape both allows and impels evaluation of film impacts on individual viewers and the broader culture in which they are imbedded. Although such analysis may have previously been limited to box office numbers, critics' reviews, and theater exit surveys, the rise of new media provides both the ability to connect filmmakers, activists, and viewers in new ways and the data in which to study the process. This capability, combined with significant growth in the documentary landscape, suggests a great potential for documentary film to contribute to some of our most pressing social and environmental needs. A social scientific approach, that combines empirical analysis with theory applied from basic science, ensures that impact can be measured and leveraged in a way that is useful for both filmmakers as well as funders. In the end, this attention to impact ensures a continued thriving marketplace for issue-based documentary films in our social landscape. References Abrash, Barbara. "Social Issue Documentary: The Evolution of Public Engagement." American University Center for Social Media 21 Apr. 2010. 26 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/›. Aufderheide, Patricia. "The Changing Documentary Marketplace." Cineaste 30.3 (2005): 24-28. Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Barrett, Diana and Sheila Leddy. "Assessing Creative Media's Social Impact." The Fledgling Fund, Dec. 2008. 15 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.thefledglingfund.org/media/research.html›. Barsam, Richard M. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1992. BRITDOC Foundation. The End of the Line: A Social Impact Evaluation. London: Channel 4, 2011. 12 Oct. 2011 ‹http://britdoc.org/news_details/the_social_impact_of_the_end_of_the_line/›. Cieply, Michael. "Uneven Growth for Film Studio with a Message." New York Times 5 Jun. 2011: B1. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. "Emerging Media and Documentary Practice." The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs. Aug. 2008. 22 Sep. 2011. ‹http://www.gpia.info/node/911›. Grierson, John. "First Principles of Documentary (1932)." Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. Eds. Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. 97-102. Hart, Philip Solomon and Anthony Leiserowitz. "Finding the Teachable Moment: An Analysis of Information-Seeking Behavior on Global Warming Related Websites during the Release of The Day After Tomorrow." Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 3.3 (2009): 355-66. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. ———. "Transmedia Storytelling 101." Confessions of an Aca-Fan. The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 22 Mar. 2007. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html›. Madaus, George, and Daniel Stufflebeam. "Program Evaluation: A Historical Overview." Evaluation in Education and Human Services 49.1 (2002): 3-18. Manyika, James, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Brad Brown, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, and Angela Hung Byers. Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. McKinsey Global Institute. May 2011 ‹http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/›. Muraskin, Lana. Understanding Evaluation: The Way to Better Prevention Programs. Washington: U.S. Department of Education, 1993. 8 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www2.ed.gov/PDFDocs/handbook.pdf›. Nichols, Bill. "Foreword." Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997. 11-13. Nisbet, Matthew. "Gasland and Dirty Business: Documentary Films Shape Debate on Energy Policy." Big Think, 9 May 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://bigthink.com/ideas/38345›. ———. "Introduction: Understanding the Social Impact of a Documentary Film." Documentaries on a Mission: How Nonprofits Are Making Movies for Public Engagement. Ed. Karen Hirsch, Center for Social Media. Mar. 2007. 10 Sep. 2011 ‹http://aladinrc.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/4634/1/docs_on_a_mission.pdf›. Nisbet, Matthew, and Patricia Aufderheide. "Documentary Film: Towards a Research Agenda on Forms, Functions, and Impacts." Mass Communication and Society 12.4 (2011): 450-56. Orszag, Peter. Increased Emphasis on Program Evaluation. Washington: Office of Management and Budget. 7 Oct. 2009. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-01.pdf›. Participant Media. "Our Mission." 2011. 2 Apr. 2011 ‹http://www.participantmedia.com/company/about_us.php.›. Plantinga, Carl. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Trochim, William, and James Donnelly. Research Methods Knowledge Base. 3rd ed. Mason: Atomic Dogs, 2007. Ubiñas, Luis. "President's Message." 2009 Annual Report. Ford Foundation, Sep. 2010. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.fordfoundation.org/about-us/2009-annual-report/presidents-message›. Vladica, Florin, and Charles Davis. "Business Innovation and New Media Practices in Documentary Film Production and Distribution: Conceptual Framework and Review of Evidence." The Media as a Driver of the Information Society. Eds. Ed Albarran, Paulo Faustino, and R. Santos. Lisbon, Portugal: Media XXI / Formal, 2009. 299-319. Whiteman, David. "Out of the Theaters and into the Streets: A Coalition Model of the Political Impact of Documentary Film and Video." Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 51-69. ———. "The Evolving Impact of Documentary Film: Sacrifice and the Rise of Issue-Centered Outreach." Post Script 22 Jun. 2007. 10 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording/5517496-1.html›. Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute, 1995. Working Films. "Nonprofits: Working Films." Foundation Source Access 31 May 2011. 5 Oct. 2011 ‹http://access.foundationsource.com/nonprofit/working-films/›.

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs infamously changed the law to read: “some animals are more equal than others” (108). From Charlotte’s Web to Babe, there are a plethora of contemporary cultural references, as well as expressions of their intelligence and worth, which would seem to support the pigs’ cause. However, simultaneously, the term “pig” is also synonymous with negative attributes—greed, dirtiness, disarray, brutality and chauvinism. Pigs are also used to name those out of favour, including police officers, the obese, capitalists and male chauvinists. Yet, the animal’s name is also used to express the most extraordinary and unlikely events as in “pigs might fly”. On the one hand, pigs are praised and represented as intelligent and useful, but then they are derided as unclean and slovenly. We are similarly paradoxical in our relationship with then, ranging from using them as a food source to keeping them as pets, and from seeing them as a valuable farm animal/resource or dangerous feral pest depending on which side of the farm gate they are on. Pigs also give a voice to many aspects of popular culture and feature in novels, fairytales, cartoons, comics and movies. As food, pigs are both for feasts and forbidden, their meat the site of both desire and disgust. They are smoked, roasted, fried, stewed and braised, and farmed in the worst of industrial food producing factories. They are also leading the charge in an eating revolution which is calling for heritage, free-range, organic and cruelty-free farming. Snuck into dishes during the Inquisition to expose false conversos, pigs are today seen by some as unclean, inedible and/or fattening and, yet, they provide the symbolic heart of tip-to-tail eating and some of the most expensive and desired of foodie products: heritage Spanish hams, for instance. In an age where to be slender is the goal of many, pigs have been bred and farmed to provide pork which is ever leaner, and yet, their fat—at its most unctuous and melting—is providing a space where the most celebrated of chefs revel. When more and more people are disconnected from what they eat, snout-to-tail eaters are dining on recognisable pigs’ ears, pig’s head filled pies and braised trotters. For many, pigs are the other white meat.Those of us who grew up with television muppet, Miss Piggy, are familiar with the mixed feelings that pigs can evoke. As the contributions to this issue attest, the idea of “pig” can evoke a similarly wide range of responses from scholars working in a variety of disciplines. While as editors we approached the idea of “pig” from an interdisciplinary food studies approach, the symbolic, and even iconic, significance of the pig is a central concern of all of the papers. As Claude Lévi-Strauss put it so elegantly “food has to be good to think as well as to eat” (1963: 128). A number of the authors in this issue have responded with a regional or country-specific focus, and include perspectives from, or about, places and cultures as diverse as Ireland, Tonga, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, the USA and China. “The Pig in Irish Cuisine and Culture”, the title and subject of Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire’s historical analysis, opens with the fact that more pork is eaten per capita than any other meat in Ireland but pigs themselves are almost invisible. Various themes confirm the importance of pigs in Irish culture—literature, folklore, the domestication of the animal and their value in household economics, their role in feasts and how they are raised, killed, prepared and consumed. How the history of the pig in Ireland complements that of the potato—the food item more widely recognised as a major contributor to Irish cuisine—is also included, as are an indication of the new interpretations of Irish pork and bacon dishes by contemporary chefs. In Tonga, conversely, pigs are killed to mark a special event, and are not eaten as everyday food by most people, although they are very significant in Tongan life and culture precisely because of this ceremonial importance. In “Pu‘aka Tonga,” ex-resident of Tonga Mandy Treagus, explains that this is one of the few things about the Tongan diet that has not changed since Cook visited the area and named it the “Friendly Islands”. Treagus also critiques the ways in which the Tongan diet has changed, and how food in Tonga is a neo-colonial issue with pervasive and, sometimes, negative ramifications for Tongans.Jeremy Fisher’s memoir “Tusk” similarly weaves personal and cultural history together, this time in New Zealand. “Tusk” orients the life story of the narrator’s father around the watershed moment he experienced when he killed a boar at 16. The tusks he took from the killing were mounted on gold and accompanied him throughout his life, as well as acting as a reminder to others of his act. The tusks thus function as a physical reminder of the night he spent out in the bush and killed the boar, but also a remembrance of both change and continuity over time. Jenny Smith moves us spatially, and temporally, to the Soviet Union in her “Tushonka: Cultivating Soviet Postwar Taste”. During the Second World War, the USA sent meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. However, after receiving several shipments of SPAM, a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka, was requested. Smith uses the example of tuskonka to trace how this pig-based product not only kept soldiers alive during the war, but how later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritised muscle over fat and influenced pig breeding programs. Smith asserts that this had a significant influence on faming and food processing in the Soviet Union, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer.Pigs are at the centre of debates that have arisen from the growth of a number of social movements that are becoming increasingly mainstream, reminding us that they are also alive, and beings in their own right. These movements include environmentalism, vegetarianism and other alternative food movements advocating ethical eating. Thus, in his analysis of alien creatures with pig and human features in the science fiction series Dr Who, “Those Pig-Men Things”, Brett Mills explores our reactions to these characters and their fates. Discussing why pig-human representations are capable of being both “shocking and horrific”, but also of arousing our empathy, Mills’s analysis suggests the possibility of more complex notions of human/non-human interaction. It also assists in working towards, as he states, “helpfully destabilis[ing our] simplistic ideas of the superiority of the human race.” The deepest form of human-animal interaction underlies Peta S. Cook and Nicholas Osbaldiston’s “Pigs Hearts and Human Bodies: A Cultural Approach to Xenotransplantation”. Cook and Osbaldiston discuss how our categorisation of animals as a lower species has enabled their exploitation, arguing how, in the contemporary West, we largely attribute “a sacred high value to human bodies, and a low, profane quality to animal bodies.” The authors provide a compelling account of the social and cultural ramifications of the use of pigs in xenotransplantation (animal-to-human transplantation), a process in which the current “choice” animal source is pigs. The line dividing human and animal can at other times be a tenuous one, demonstrated by the anxiety generated over eating practices exposed in fears of eating “like a pig”. In her article, “Sugar Pigs: Children’s Consumption of Confectionery”, Toni Risson explains how rules about eating and concealing food in the mouth remind us that eating is an animal act that instruction is required to modify and control. Children’s lolly-eating rituals—sharing half-eaten food, monitoring the progress of its consumption and change, and using fingers to inspect this change or pull stuck lollies off teeth—can evoke disgust in adults, but can also create friendship networks, intimacy and a sense of belonging for children as they transgress the rules of civilised eating. As Risson puts it, as “the antithesis of civilisation, the pig is the means by which we understand ourselves as civilised beings, but the child with a lolly is an ever-present reminder that we may be animals after all”.Feminism can be added to this list of social movements, with Arhlene Ann Flowers drawing attention to the power of language in her article “Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?”. Flowers chronicles the linguistic battle between the presidential candidates in the US 2008 campaign over the colloquialism “lipstick on a pig”, used in a speech by then Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. Flowers traces the history of this phrase, as well as the use of other porcine terms in political language including “pork barrelling” and “male chauvinist pig.”In her article about New York’s first gastrobpub, The Spotted Pig, one of the co-editors of this issue, Donna Lee Brien, has constructed a brief restaurant biography for the eatery famous for founding chef April Bloomfield’s nose-to-tail, locally sourced pork dishes. In this, Brien reflects upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining, whether as “raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, brand, symbol or marketing tool.” In Lillian Ng’s novel, Swallowing Clouds, references to pigs are similarly closely related to food, but in her article, Spanish author Catalina Ribas Segura argues these references to flesh and meat evoke the concepts of freedom, transgression and desire. In “Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds”, Segura focuses on pork and the pig and what these reveal about the two main characters’ relationship. One of these, Zhu Zhiyee, is a butcher, which means that pigs and pork are recurrent topics throughout the novel, but other porcine expressions appear throughout. Pig-related terminology in the novel provides a means for Segura to consider the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, and includes a discussion about the connotations of pigs in Chinese culture, where pork is used in a variety of dishes. Lee McGowan’s “Piggery and Predictability: An Exploration of the Hog in Football’s Limelight” focuses in more closely on one of the uses to which we have put pigs, discussing how far “the beautiful game” of football (soccer) has come from the days when an inflated pigs bladder was used as the ball.Reversing this focus from use back to how we, as humans, relate to animals, can show that how we conceive of pigs in our human history reveals our own prejudices. It is known that pigs and humans have interacted for some 10,000 years. The history of that interaction and their own adaptability mean that pigs have a broad range of possible relationships with humans, wider and more complex than either that of many other species or our contemporary treatment of them would attest. The other co-editor of this issue, Adele Wessell, takes a historical perspective to restore pigs to the centre of the narrative in “Making a Pig of the Humanities.” Drawing on a growing body of work on nonhuman animals, Wessell is interested in what a history of pigs and our relationship with them reveals about humans more generally. She argues that all the significant themes in modern history—production, religion, the body, science, power, the national state, colonialism, gender, consumption, migration, memory—can be understood through a history of our relationships with pigs. Jim Hearn is a chef, a researcher and writer. Hearn’s article “Percy” is the story of a pig who, as the only pig in the farmyard, longs to “escape the burden of allegory”. All Percy wanted was to belong, but his pig-ness caused offence to all the other animals in the farm. Percy’s story is about belonging and identity, body-image and representation, told from a pig’s point of view. Percy is burdened with the layers of meaning that have built up around pigs and longs to escape, and this fable provides a fitting ending to this issue.Together, we hope the articles in this collection indicate the wide significance and large number of meanings of “pig” that are possible for different cultures and across historical periods, and the place that pigs inhabit in our national, popular and food cultures. They reveal how pigs are used and misused, as well as how they are understood and misunderstood. These interesting and diverse articles also show how pigs are both material and allegorical; how they are paradoxical in how they are revered, avoided and derided; and, commonly, how they are eaten. ReferencesOrwell, George. Animal Farm. Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library—Library Society, 2004.Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Boston, Beacon Press, 1963.

Introduction With a deluge of mouthwatering pre-publicity, the opening of The Spotted Pig, the USA’s first self-identified British-styled gastropub, in Manhattan in February 2004 was much anticipated. The late Australian chef, food writer and restauranteur Mietta O’Donnell has noted how “taking over a building or business which has a long established reputation can be a mixed blessing” because of the way that memories “can enrich the experience of being in a place or they can just make people nostalgic”. Bistro Le Zoo, the previous eatery on the site, had been very popular when it opened almost a decade earlier, and its closure was mourned by some diners (Young; Kaminsky “Feeding Time”; Steinhauer & McGinty). This regret did not, however, appear to affect The Spotted Pig’s success. As esteemed New York Times reviewer Frank Bruni noted in his 2006 review: “Almost immediately after it opened […] the throngs started to descend, and they have never stopped”. The following year, The Spotted Pig was awarded a Michelin star—the first year that Michelin ranked New York—and has kept this star in the subsequent annual rankings. Writing Restaurant Biography Detailed studies have been published of almost every type of contemporary organisation including public institutions such as schools, hospitals, museums and universities, as well as non-profit organisations such as charities and professional associations. These are often written to mark a major milestone, or some significant change, development or the demise of the organisation under consideration (Brien). Detailed studies have also recently been published of businesses as diverse as general stores (Woody), art galleries (Fossi), fashion labels (Koda et al.), record stores (Southern & Branson), airlines (Byrnes; Jones), confectionary companies (Chinn) and builders (Garden). In terms of attracting mainstream readerships, however, few such studies seem able to capture popular reader interest as those about eating establishments including restaurants and cafés. This form of restaurant life history is, moreover, not restricted to ‘quality’ establishments. Fast food restaurant chains have attracted their share of studies (see, for example Love; Jakle & Sculle), ranging from business-economic analyses (Liu), socio-cultural political analyses (Watson), and memoirs (Kroc & Anderson), to criticism around their conduct and effects (Striffler). Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the most well-known published critique of the fast food industry and its effects with, famously, the Rolling Stone article on which it was based generating more reader mail than any other piece run in the 1990s. The book itself (researched narrative creative nonfiction), moreover, made a fascinating transition to the screen, transformed into a fictionalised drama (co-written by Schlosser) that narrates the content of the book from the point of view of a series of fictional/composite characters involved in the industry, rather than in a documentary format. Akin to the range of studies of fast food restaurants, there are also a variety of studies of eateries in US motels, caravan parks, diners and service station restaurants (see, for example, Baeder). Although there has been little study of this sub-genre of food and drink publishing, their popularity can be explained, at least in part, because such volumes cater to the significant readership for writing about food related topics of all kinds, with food writing recently identified as mainstream literary fare in the USA and UK (Hughes) and an entire “publishing subculture” in Australia (Dunstan & Chaitman). Although no exact tally exists, an informed estimate by the founder of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and president of the Paris Cookbook Fair, Edouard Cointreau, has more than 26,000 volumes on food and wine related topics currently published around the world annually (ctd. in Andriani “Gourmand Awards”). The readership for publications about restaurants can also perhaps be attributed to the wide range of information that can be included a single study. My study of a selection of these texts from the UK, USA and Australia indicates that this can include narratives of place and architecture dealing with the restaurant’s location, locale and design; narratives of directly food-related subject matter such as menus, recipes and dining trends; and narratives of people, in the stories of its proprietors, staff and patrons. Detailed studies of contemporary individual establishments commonly take the form of authorised narratives either written by the owners, chefs or other staff with the help of a food journalist, historian or other professional writer, or produced largely by that writer with the assistance of the premise’s staff. These studies are often extensively illustrated with photographs and, sometimes, drawings or reproductions of other artworks, and almost always include recipes. Two examples of these from my own collection include a centennial history of a famous New Orleans eatery that survived Hurricane Katrina, Galatoire’s Cookbook. Written by employees—the chief operating officer/general manager (Melvin Rodrigue) and publicist (Jyl Benson)—this incorporates reminiscences from both other staff and patrons. The second is another study of a New Orleans’ restaurant, this one by the late broadcaster and celebrity local historian Mel Leavitt. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant, compiled with the assistance of the Two Sisters’ proprietor, Joseph Fein Joseph III, was first published in 1992 and has been so enduringly popular that it is in its eighth printing. These texts, in common with many others of this type, trace a triumph-over-adversity company history that incorporates a series of mildly scintillating anecdotes, lists of famous chefs and diners, and signature recipes. Although obviously focused on an external readership, they can also be characterised as an instance of what David M. Boje calls an organisation’s “story performance” (106) as the process of creating these narratives mobilises an organisation’s (in these cases, a commercial enterprise’s) internal information processing and narrative building activities. Studies of contemporary restaurants are much more rarely written without any involvement from the eatery’s personnel. When these are, the results tend to have much in common with more critical studies such as Fast Food Nation, as well as so-called architectural ‘building biographies’ which attempt to narrate the historical and social forces that “explain the shapes and uses” (Ellis, Chao & Parrish 70) of the physical structures we create. Examples of this would include Harding’s study of the importance of the Boeuf sur le Toit in Parisian life in the 1920s and Middlebrook’s social history of London’s Strand Corner House. Such work agrees with Kopytoff’s assertion—following Appadurai’s proposal that objects possess their own ‘biographies’ which need to be researched and expressed—that such inquiry can reveal not only information about the objects under consideration, but also about readers as we examine our “cultural […] aesthetic, historical, and even political” responses to these narratives (67). The life story of a restaurant will necessarily be entangled with those of the figures who have been involved in its establishment and development, as well as the narratives they create around the business. This following brief study of The Spotted Pig, however, written without the assistance of the establishment’s personnel, aims to outline a life story for this eatery in order to reflect upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining practice in New York as raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, product, brand, symbol and marketing tool, as well as, at times, purely as an animal identity. The Spotted Pig Widely profiled before it even opened, The Spotted Pig is reportedly one of the city’s “most popular” restaurants (Michelin 349). It is profiled in all the city guidebooks I could locate in print and online, featuring in some of these as a key stop on recommended itineraries (see, for instance, Otis 39). A number of these proclaim it to be the USA’s first ‘gastropub’—the term first used in 1991 in the UK to describe a casual hotel/bar with good food and reasonable prices (Farley). The Spotted Pig is thus styled on a shabby-chic version of a traditional British hotel, featuring a cluttered-but-well arranged use of pig-themed objects and illustrations that is described by latest Michelin Green Guide of New York City as “a country-cute décor that still manages to be hip” (Michelin 349). From the three-dimensional carved pig hanging above the entrance in a homage to the shingles of traditional British hotels, to the use of its image on the menu, website and souvenir tee-shirts, the pig as motif proceeds its use as a foodstuff menu item. So much so, that the restaurant is often (affectionately) referred to by patrons and reviewers simply as ‘The Pig’. The restaurant has become so well known in New York in the relatively brief time it has been operating that it has not only featured in a number of novels and memoirs, but, moreover, little or no explanation has been deemed necessary as the signifier of “The Spotted Pig” appears to convey everything that needs to be said about an eatery of quality and fashion. In the thriller Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel, when John Locke’s hero has to leave the restaurant and becomes involved in a series of dangerous escapades, he wants nothing more but to get back to his dinner (107, 115). The restaurant is also mentioned a number of times in Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle in relation to a (fictional) new movie of the same name. The joke in the book is that the character doesn’t know of the restaurant (26). In David Goodwillie’s American Subversive, the story of a journalist-turned-blogger and a homegrown terrorist set in New York, the narrator refers to “Scarlett Johansson, for instance, and the hostess at the Spotted Pig” (203-4) as the epitome of attractiveness. The Spotted Pig is also mentioned in Suzanne Guillette’s memoir, Much to Your Chagrin, when the narrator is on a dinner date but fears running into her ex-boyfriend: ‘Jack lives somewhere in this vicinity […] Vaguely, you recall him telling you he was not too far from the Spotted Pig on Greenwich—now, was it Greenwich Avenue or Greenwich Street?’ (361). The author presumes readers know the right answer in order to build tension in this scene. Although this success is usually credited to the joint efforts of backer, music executive turned restaurateur Ken Friedman, his partner, well-known chef, restaurateur, author and television personality Mario Batali, and their UK-born and trained chef, April Bloomfield (see, for instance, Batali), a significant part has been built on Bloomfield’s pork cookery. The very idea of a “spotted pig” itself raises a central tenet of Bloomfield’s pork/food philosophy which is sustainable and organic. That is, not the mass produced, industrially farmed pig which produces a leaner meat, but the fatty, tastier varieties of pig such as the heritage six-spotted Berkshire which is “darker, more heavily marbled with fat, juicier and richer-tasting than most pork” (Fabricant). Bloomfield has, indeed, made pig’s ears—long a Chinese restaurant staple in the city and a key ingredient of Southern US soul food as well as some traditional Japanese and Spanish dishes—fashionable fare in the city, and her current incarnation, a crispy pig’s ear salad with lemon caper dressing (TSP 2010) is much acclaimed by reviewers. This approach to ingredients—using the ‘whole beast’, local whenever possible, and the concentration on pork—has been underlined and enhanced by a continuing relationship with UK chef Fergus Henderson. In his series of London restaurants under the banner of “St. John”, Henderson is famed for the approach to pork cookery outlined in his two books Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, published in 1999 (re-published both in the UK and the US as The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating), and Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part II (coauthored with Justin Piers Gellatly in 2007). Henderson has indeed been identified as starting a trend in dining and food publishing, focusing on sustainably using as food the entirety of any animal killed for this purpose, but which mostly focuses on using all parts of pigs. In publishing, this includes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect, subtitled Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them, John Barlow’s Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain and Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes (2008). In restaurants, it certainly includes The Spotted Pig. So pervasive has embrace of whole beast pork consumption been in New York that, by 2007, Bruni could write that these are: “porky times, fatty times, which is to say very good times indeed. Any new logo for the city could justifiably place the Big Apple in the mouth of a spit-roasted pig” (Bruni). This demand set the stage perfectly for, in October 2007, Henderson to travel to New York to cook pork-rich menus at The Spotted Pig in tandem with Bloomfield (Royer). He followed this again in 2008 and, by 2009, this annual event had become known as “FergusStock” and was covered by local as well as UK media, and a range of US food weblogs. By 2009, it had grown to become a dinner at the Spotted Pig with half the dishes on the menu by Henderson and half by Bloomfield, and a dinner the next night at David Chang’s acclaimed Michelin-starred Momofuku Noodle Bar, which is famed for its Cantonese-style steamed pork belly buns. A third dinner (and then breakfast/brunch) followed at Friedman/Bloomfield’s Breslin Bar and Dining Room (discussed below) (Rose). The Spotted Pig dinners have become famed for Henderson’s pig’s head and pork trotter dishes with the chef himself recognising that although his wasn’t “the most obvious food to cook for America”, it was the case that “at St John, if a couple share a pig’s head, they tend to be American” (qtd. in Rose). In 2009, the pigs’ head were presented in pies which Henderson has described as “puff pastry casing, with layers of chopped, cooked pig’s head and potato, so all the lovely, bubbly pig’s head juices go into the potato” (qtd. in Rose). Bloomfield was aged only 28 when, in 2003, with a recommendation from Jamie Oliver, she interviewed for, and won, the position of executive chef of The Spotted Pig (Fabricant; Q&A). Following this introduction to the US, her reputation as a chef has grown based on the strength of her pork expertise. Among a host of awards, she was named one of US Food & Wine magazine’s ten annual Best New Chefs in 2007. In 2009, she was a featured solo session titled “Pig, Pig, Pig” at the fourth Annual International Chefs Congress, a prestigious New York City based event where “the world’s most influential and innovative chefs, pastry chefs, mixologists, and sommeliers present the latest techniques and culinary concepts to their peers” (Starchefs.com). Bloomfield demonstrated breaking down a whole suckling St. Canut milk raised piglet, after which she butterflied, rolled and slow-poached the belly, and fried the ears. As well as such demonstrations of expertise, she is also often called upon to provide expert comment on pork-related news stories, with The Spotted Pig regularly the subject of that food news. For example, when a rare, heritage Hungarian pig was profiled as a “new” New York pork source in 2009, this story arose because Bloomfield had served a Mangalitsa/Berkshire crossbreed pig belly and trotter dish with Agen prunes (Sanders) at The Spotted Pig. Bloomfield was quoted as the authority on the breed’s flavour and heritage authenticity: “it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven […] This pork has that same authentic taste” (qtd. in Sanders). Bloomfield has also used this expert profile to support a series of pork-related causes. These include the Thanksgiving Farm in the Catskill area, which produces free range pork for its resident special needs children and adults, and helps them gain meaningful work-related skills in working with these pigs. Bloomfield not only cooks for the project’s fundraisers, but also purchases any excess pigs for The Spotted Pig (Estrine 103). This strong focus on pork is not, however, exclusive. The Spotted Pig is also one of a number of American restaurants involved in the Meatless Monday campaign, whereby at least one vegetarian option is included on menus in order to draw attention to the benefits of a plant-based diet. When, in 2008, Bloomfield beat the Iron Chef in the sixth season of the US version of the eponymous television program, the central ingredient was nothing to do with pork—it was olives. Diversifying from this focus on ‘pig’ can, however, be dangerous. Friedman and Bloomfield’s next enterprise after The Spotted Pig was The John Dory seafood restaurant at the corner of 10th Avenue and 16th Street. This opened in November 2008 to reviews that its food was “uncomplicated and nearly perfect” (Andrews 22), won Bloomfield Time Out New York’s 2009 “Best New Hand at Seafood” award, but was not a success. The John Dory was a more formal, but smaller, restaurant that was more expensive at a time when the financial crisis was just biting, and was closed the following August. Friedman blamed the layout, size and neighbourhood (Stein) and its reservation system, which limited walk-in diners (ctd. in Vallis), but did not mention its non-pork, seafood orientation. When, almost immediately, another Friedman/Bloomfield project was announced, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room (which opened in October 2009 in the Ace Hotel at 20 West 29th Street and Broadway), the enterprise was closely modeled on the The Spotted Pig. In preparation, its senior management—Bloomfield, Friedman and sous-chefs, Nate Smith and Peter Cho (who was to become the Breslin’s head chef)—undertook a tasting tour of the UK that included Henderson’s St. John Bread & Wine Bar (Leventhal). Following this, the Breslin’s menu highlighted a series of pork dishes such as terrines, sausages, ham and potted styles (Rosenberg & McCarthy), with even Bloomfield’s pork scratchings (crispy pork rinds) bar snacks garnering glowing reviews (see, for example, Severson; Ghorbani). Reviewers, moreover, waxed lyrically about the menu’s pig-based dishes, the New York Times reviewer identifying this focus as catering to New York diners’ “fetish for pork fat” (Sifton). This representative review details not only “an entree of gently smoked pork belly that’s been roasted to tender goo, for instance, over a drift of buttery mashed potatoes, with cabbage and bacon on the side” but also a pig’s foot “in gravy made of reduced braising liquid, thick with pillowy shallots and green flecks of deconstructed brussels sprouts” (Sifton). Sifton concluded with the proclamation that this style of pork was “very good: meat that is fat; fat that is meat”. Concluding remarks Bloomfield has listed Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie as among her favourite food books. Publishers Weekly reviewer called Ruhlman “a food poet, and the pig is his muse” (Q&A). In August 2009, it was reported that Bloomfield had always wanted to write a cookbook (Marx) and, in July 2010, HarperCollins imprint Ecco publisher and foodbook editor Dan Halpern announced that he was planning a book with her, tentatively titled, A Girl and Her Pig (Andriani “Ecco Expands”). As a “cookbook with memoir running throughout” (Maurer), this will discuss the influence of the pig on her life as well as how to cook pork. This text will obviously also add to the data known about The Spotted Pig, but until then, this brief gastrobiography has attempted to outline some of the human, and in this case, animal, stories that lie behind all businesses. References Andrews, Colman. “Its Up To You, New York, New York.” Gourmet Apr. (2009): 18-22, 111. Andriani, Lynn. “Ecco Expands Cookbook Program: HC Imprint Signs Up Seven New Titles.” Publishers Weekly 12 Jul. (2010) 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/43803-ecco-expands-cookbook-program.html Andriani, Lynn. “Gourmand Awards Receive Record Number of Cookbook Entries.” Publishers Weekly 27 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/44573-gourmand-awards-receive-record-number-of-cookbook-entries.html Appadurai, Arjun. 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This article investigates the possibilities for understanding waste as a resource, with a particular focus on understanding food waste as a food resource. It considers the popular yeast spread Vegemite within this frame. The spread’s origins in waste product, and how it has achieved and sustained its status as a popular symbol of Australia despite half a century of Australian gastro-multiculturalism and a marked public resistance to other recycling and reuse of food products, have not yet been a focus of study. The process of producing Vegemite from waste would seem to align with contemporary moves towards recycling food waste, and ensuring environmental sustainability and food security, yet even during times of austerity and environmental concern this has not provided the company with a viable marketing strategy. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of product memorialisation have created a superbrand through focusing on Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value.John Scanlan notes that producing waste is a core feature of modern life, and what we dispose of as surplus to our requirements—whether this comprises material objects or more abstract products such as knowledge—reveals much about our society. In observing this, Scanlan asks us to consider the quite radical idea that waste is central to everything of significance to us: the “possibility that the surprising core of all we value results from (and creates even more) garbage (both the material and the metaphorical)” (9). Others have noted the ambivalent relationship we have with the waste we produce. C. T. Anderson notes that we are both creator and agent of its disposal. It is our ambivalence towards waste, coupled with its ubiquity, that allows waste materials to be described so variously: negatively as garbage, trash and rubbish, or more positively as by-products, leftovers, offcuts, trimmings, and recycled.This ambivalence is also crucial to understanding the affectionate relationship the Australian public have with Vegemite, a relationship that appears to exist in spite of the product’s unpalatable origins in waste. A study of Vegemite reveals that consumers can be comfortable with waste, even to the point of eating recycled waste, as long as that fact remains hidden and unmentioned. In Vegemite’s case not only has the product’s connection to waste been rendered invisible, it has been largely kept out of sight despite considerable media and other attention focusing on the product. Recycling Food Waste into Food ProductRecent work such as Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land and Tristram Stuart’s Waste make waste uncomfortably visible, outlining how much waste, and food waste in particular, the Western world generates and how profligately this is disposed of. Their aim is clear: a call to less extravagant and more sustainable practices. The relatively recent interest in reducing our food waste has, of course, introduced more complexity into a simple linear movement from the creation of a food product, to its acquisition or purchase, and then to its consumption and/or its disposal. Moreover, the recycling, reuse and repurposing of what has previously been discarded as waste is reconfiguring the whole idea of what waste is, as well as what value it has. The initiatives that seem to offer the most promise are those that reconfigure the way waste is understood. However, it is not only the process of transforming waste from an abject nuisance into a valued product that is central here. It is also necessary to reconfigure people’s acculturated perceptions of, and reactions to waste. Food waste is generated during all stages of the food cycle: while the raw materials are being grown; while these are being processed; when the resulting food products are being sold; when they are prepared in the home or other kitchen; and when they are only partly consumed. Until recently, the food industry in the West almost universally produced large volumes of solid and liquid waste that not only posed problems of disposal and pollution for the companies involved, but also represented a reckless squandering of total food resources in terms of both nutrient content and valuable biomass for society at large. While this is currently changing, albeit slowly, the by-products of food processing were, and often are, dumped (Stuart). In best-case scenarios, various gardening, farming and industrial processes gather household and commercial food waste for use as animal feed or as components in fertilisers (Delgado et al; Wang et al). This might, on the surface, appear a responsible application of waste, yet the reality is that such food waste often includes perfectly good fruit and vegetables that are not quite the required size, shape or colour, meat trimmings and products (such as offal) that are completely edible but extraneous to processing need, and other high grade product that does not meet certain specifications—such as the mountains of bread crusts sandwich producers discard (Hickman), or food that is still edible but past its ‘sell by date.’ In the last few years, however, mounting public awareness over the issues of world hunger, resource conservation, and the environmental and economic costs associated with food waste has accelerated efforts to make sustainable use of available food supplies and to more efficiently recycle, recover and utilise such needlessly wasted food product. This has fed into and led to multiple new policies, instances of research into, and resultant methods for waste handling and treatment (Laufenberg et al). Most straightforwardly, this involves the use or sale of offcuts, trimmings and unwanted ingredients that are “often of prime quality and are only rejected from the production line as a result of standardisation requirements or retailer specification” from one process for use in another, in such processed foods as soups, baby food or fast food products (Henningsson et al. 505). At a higher level, such recycling seeks to reclaim any reusable substances of significant food value from what could otherwise be thought of as a non-usable waste product. Enacting this is largely dependent on two elements: an available technology and being able to obtain a price or other value for the resultant product that makes the process worthwhile for the recycler to engage in it (Laufenberg et al). An example of the latter is the use of dehydrated restaurant food waste as a feedstuff for finishing pigs, a reuse process with added value for all involved as this process produces both a nutritious food substance as well as a viable way of disposing of restaurant waste (Myer et al). In Japan, laws regarding food waste recycling, which are separate from those governing other organic waste, are ensuring that at least some of food waste is being converted into animal feed, especially for the pigs who are destined for human tables (Stuart). Other recycling/reuse is more complex and involves more lateral thinking, with the by-products from some food processing able to be utilised, for instance, in the production of dyes, toiletries and cosmetics (Henningsson et al), although many argue for the privileging of food production in the recycling of foodstuffs.Brewing is one such process that has been in the reuse spotlight recently as large companies seek to minimise their waste product so as to be able to market their processes as sustainable. In 2009, for example, the giant Foster’s Group (with over 150 brands of beer, wine, spirits and ciders) proudly claimed that it recycled or reused some 91.23% of 171,000 tonnes of operational waste, with only 8.77% of this going to landfill (Foster’s Group). The treatment and recycling of the massive amounts of water used for brewing, rinsing and cooling purposes (Braeken et al.; Fillaudeaua et al.) is of significant interest, and is leading to research into areas as diverse as the development microbial fuel cells—where added bacteria consume the water-soluble brewing wastes, thereby cleaning the water as well as releasing chemical energy that is then converted into electricity (Lagan)—to using nutrient-rich wastewater as the carbon source for creating bioplastics (Yu et al.).In order for the waste-recycling-reuse loop to be closed in the best way for securing food supplies, any new product salvaged and created from food waste has to be both usable, and used, as food (Stuart)—and preferably as a food source for people to consume. There is, however, considerable consumer resistance to such reuse. Resistance to reusing recycled water in Australia has been documented by the CSIRO, which identified negative consumer perception as one of the two primary impediments to water reuse, the other being the fundamental economics of the process (MacDonald & Dyack). This consumer aversion operates even in times of severe water shortages, and despite proof of the cleanliness and safety of the resulting treated water. There was higher consumer acceptance levels for using stormwater rather than recycled water, despite the treated stormwater being shown to have higher concentrations of contaminants (MacDonald & Dyack). This reveals the extent of public resistance to the potential consumption of recycled waste product when it is labelled as such, even when this consumption appears to benefit that public. Vegemite: From Waste Product to Australian IconIn this context, the savoury yeast spread Vegemite provides an example of how food processing waste can be repurposed into a new food product that can gain a high level of consumer acceptability. It has been able to retain this status despite half a century of Australian gastronomic multiculturalism and the wide embrace of a much broader range of foodstuffs. Indeed, Vegemite is so ubiquitous in Australian foodways that it is recognised as an international superbrand, a standing it has been able to maintain despite most consumers from outside Australasia finding it unpalatable (Rozin & Siegal). However, Vegemite’s long product history is one in which its origin as recycled waste has been omitted, or at the very least, consistently marginalised.Vegemite’s history as a consumer product is narrated in a number of accounts, including one on the Kraft website, where the apocryphal and actual blend. What all these narratives agree on is that in the early 1920s Fred Walker—of Fred Walker and Company, Melbourne, canners of meat for export and Australian manufacturers of Bonox branded beef stock beverage—asked his company chemist to emulate Marmite yeast extract (Farrer). The imitation product was based, as was Marmite, on the residue from spent brewer’s yeast. This waste was initially sourced from Melbourne-based Carlton & United Breweries, and flavoured with vegetables, spices and salt (Creswell & Trenoweth). Today, the yeast left after Foster Group’s Australian commercial beer making processes is collected, put through a sieve to remove hop resins, washed to remove any bitterness, then mixed with warm water. The yeast dies from the lack of nutrients in this environment, and enzymes then break down the yeast proteins with the effect that vitamins and minerals are released into the resulting solution. Using centrifugal force, the yeast cell walls are removed, leaving behind a nutrient-rich brown liquid, which is then concentrated into a dark, thick paste using a vacuum process. This is seasoned with significant amounts of salt—although less today than before—and flavoured with vegetable extracts (Richardson).Given its popularity—Vegemite was found in 2009 to be the third most popular brand in Australia (Brand Asset Consulting)—it is unsurprising to find that the product has a significant history as an object of study in popular culture (Fiske et al; White), as a marker of national identity (Ivory; Renne; Rozin & Siegal; Richardson; Harper & White) and as an iconic Australian food, brand and product (Cozzolino; Luck; Khamis; Symons). Jars, packaging and product advertising are collected by Australian institutions such as Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and are regularly included in permanent and travelling exhibitions profiling Australian brands and investigating how a sense of national identity is expressed through identification with these brands. All of this significant study largely focuses on how, when and by whom the product has been taken up, and how it has been consumed, rather than its links to waste, and what this circumstance could add to current thinking about recycling of food waste into other food products.It is worth noting that Vegemite was not an initial success in the Australian marketplace, but this does not seem due to an adverse public perception to waste. Indeed, when it was first produced it was in imitation of an already popular product well-known to be made from brewery by-products, hence this origin was not an issue. It was also introduced during a time when consumer relationships to waste were quite unlike today, and thrifty re-use of was a common feature of household behaviour. Despite a national competition mounted to name the product (Richardson), Marmite continued to attract more purchasers after Vegemite’s launch in 1923, so much so that in 1928, in an attempt to differentiate itself from Marmite, Vegemite was renamed “Parwill—the all Australian product” (punning on the idea that “Ma-might” but “Pa-will”) (White 16). When this campaign was unsuccessful, the original, consumer-suggested name was reinstated, but sales still lagged behind its UK-owned prototype. It was only after remaining in production for more than a decade, and after two successful marketing campaigns in the second half of the 1930s that the Vegemite brand gained some market traction. The first of these was in 1935 and 1936, when a free jar of Vegemite was offered with every sale of an item from the relatively extensive Kraft-Walker product list (after Walker’s company merged with Kraft) (White). The second was an attention-grabbing contest held in 1937, which invited consumers to compose Vegemite-inspired limericks. However, it was not the nature of the product itself or even the task set by the competition which captured mass attention, but the prize of a desirable, exotic and valuable imported Pontiac car (Richardson 61; Superbrands).Since that time, multinational media company, J Walter Thompson (now rebranded as JWT) has continued to manage Vegemite’s marketing. JWT’s marketing has never looked to Vegemite’s status as a thrifty recycler of waste as a viable marketing strategy, even in periods of austerity (such as the Depression years and the Second World War) or in more recent times of environmental concern. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of cultural/media memorialisation have created a superbrand by focusing on two factors: its nutrient value and, as the brand became more established, its status as national icon. Throughout the regular noting and celebration of anniversaries of its initial invention and launch, with various commemorative events and products marking each of these product ‘birthdays,’ Vegemite’s status as recycled waste product has never been more than mentioned. Even when its 60th anniversary was marked in 1983 with the laying of a permanent plaque in Kerferd Road, South Melbourne, opposite Walker’s original factory, there was only the most passing reference to how, and from what, the product manufactured at the site was made. This remained the case when the site itself was prioritised for heritage listing almost twenty years later in 2001 (City of Port Phillip).Shying away from the reality of this successful example of recycling food waste into food was still the case in 1990, when Kraft Foods held a nationwide public campaign to recover past styles of Vegemite containers and packaging, and then donated their collection to Powerhouse Museum. The Powerhouse then held an exhibition of the receptacles and the historical promotional material in 1991, tracing the development of the product’s presentation (Powerhouse Museum), an occasion that dovetailed with other nostalgic commemorative activities around the product’s 70th birthday. Although the production process was noted in the exhibition, it is noteworthy that the possibilities for recycling a number of the styles of jars, as either containers with reusable lids or as drinking glasses, were given considerably more notice than the product’s origins as a recycled product. By this time, it seems, Vegemite had become so incorporated into Australian popular memory as a product in its own right, and with such a rich nostalgic history, that its origins were no longer of any significant interest or relevance.This disregard continued in the commemorative volume, The Vegemite Cookbook. With some ninety recipes and recipe ideas, the collection contains an almost unimaginably wide range of ways to use Vegemite as an ingredient. There are recipes on how to make the definitive Vegemite toast soldiers and Vegemite crumpets, as well as adaptations of foreign cuisines including pastas and risottos, stroganoffs, tacos, chilli con carne, frijole dip, marinated beef “souvlaki style,” “Indian-style” chicken wings, curries, Asian stir-fries, Indonesian gado-gado and a number of Chinese inspired dishes. Although the cookbook includes a timeline of product history illustrated with images from the major advertising campaigns that runs across 30 pages of the book, this timeline history emphasises the technological achievement of Vegemite’s creation, as opposed to the matter from which it orginated: “In a Spartan room in Albert Park Melbourne, 20 year-old food technologist Cyril P. Callister employed by Fred Walker, conducted initial experiments with yeast. His workplace was neither kitchen nor laboratory. … It was not long before this rather ordinary room yielded an extra-ordinary substance” (2). The Big Vegemite Party Book, described on its cover as “a great book for the Vegemite fan … with lots of old advertisements from magazines and newspapers,” is even more openly nostalgic, but similarly includes very little regarding Vegemite’s obviously potentially unpalatable genesis in waste.Such commemorations have continued into the new century, each one becoming more self-referential and more obviously a marketing strategy. In 2003, Vegemite celebrated its 80th birthday with the launch of the “Spread the Smile” campaign, seeking to record the childhood reminisces of adults who loved Vegemite. After this, the commemorative anniversaries broke free from even the date of its original invention and launch, and began to celebrate other major dates in the product’s life. In this way, Kraft made major news headlines when it announced that it was trying to locate the children who featured in the 1954 “Happy little Vegemites” campaign as part of the company’s celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the television advertisement. In October 2006, these once child actors joined a number of past and current Kraft employees to celebrate the supposed production of the one-billionth jar of Vegemite (Rood, "Vegemite Spreads" & "Vegemite Toasts") but, once again, little about the actual production process was discussed. In 2007, the then iconic marching band image was resituated into a contemporary setting—presumably to mobilise both the original messages (nutritious wholesomeness in an Australian domestic context) as well as its heritage appeal. Despite the real interest at this time in recycling and waste reduction, the silence over Vegemite’s status as recycled, repurposed food waste product continued.Concluding Remarks: Towards Considering Waste as a ResourceIn most parts of the Western world, including Australia, food waste is formally (in policy) and informally (by consumers) classified, disposed of, or otherwise treated alongside garden waste and other organic materials. Disposal by individuals, industry or local governments includes a range of options, from dumping to composting or breaking down in anaerobic digestion systems into materials for fertiliser, with food waste given no special status or priority. Despite current concerns regarding the security of food supplies in the West and decades of recognising that there are sections of all societies where people do not have enough to eat, it seems that recycling food waste into food that people can consume remains one of the last and least palatable solutions to these problems. This brief study of Vegemite has attempted to show how, despite the growing interest in recycling and sustainability, the focus in both the marketing of, and public interest in, this iconic and popular product appears to remain rooted in Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value and its status as a brand, and firmly away from any suggestion of innovative and prudent reuse of waste product. That this is so for an already popular product suggests that any initiatives that wish to move in this direction must first reconfigure not only the way waste itself is seen—as a valuable product to be used, rather than as a troublesome nuisance to be disposed of—but also our own understandings of, and reactions to, waste itself.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers for their perceptive, useful, and generous comments on this article. All errors are, of course, my own. The research for this work was carried out with funding from the Faculty of Arts, Business, Informatics and Education, CQUniversity, Australia.ReferencesAnderson, C. T. “Sacred Waste: Ecology, Spirit, and the American Garbage Poem.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17 (2010): 35-60.Blake, J. The Vegemite Cookbook: Delicious Recipe Ideas. Melbourne: Ark Publishing, 1992.Braeken, L., B. Van der Bruggen and C. 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Introduction Darkness is often characterised as something that warrants heightened caution and scrutiny – signifying increased danger and risk. Within settler-colonial settings such as Australia, cautionary and negative connotations of darkness are projected upon Black people and their bodies, forming part of continuing colonial regimes of power (Moreton-Robinson). Negative stereotypes of “dark” continues to racialise all Indigenous peoples. In Australia, Indigenous peoples are both Indigenous and Black regardless of skin colour, and this plays out in a range of ways, some of which will be highlighted within this article. This article demonstrates that for Indigenous peoples, associations of fear and danger are built into the structural mechanisms that shape and maintain colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples and their bodies. It is this embodied form of darkness, and its negative connotations, and responses that we explore further. Figure 1: Megan Cope’s ‘I’m not afraid of the Dark’ t-shirt (Fredericks and Heemsbergen 2021) Responding to the anxieties and fears of settlers that often surround Indigenous peoples, Quandamooka artist and member of the art collective ProppaNow, Megan Cope, has produced a range of t-shirts, one of which declares “I’m not afraid of the Dark” (fig. 1). The wording ‘reflects White Australia’s fear of blackness’ (Dark + Dangerous). Exploring race relations through the theme of “darkness”, we begin by discussing how negative connotations of darkness are represented through everyday lexicons and how efforts to shift prejudicial and racist language are often met with defensiveness and resistance. We then consider how fears towards the dark translate into everyday practices, reinforced by media representations. The article considers how stereotype, conjecture, and prejudice is inflicted upon Indigenous people and reflects white settler fears and anxieties, rooting colonialism in everyday language, action, and norms. The Language of Fear Indigenous people and others with dark skin tones are often presented as having a proclivity towards threatening, aggressive, deceitful, and negative behaviours. This works to inform how Indigenous peoples are “known” and responded to by hegemonic (predominantly white) populations. Negative connotations of Indigenous people are a means of reinforcing and legitimising the falsity that European knowledge systems, norms, and social structures are superior whilst denying the contextual colonial circumstances that have led to white dominance. In Australia, such denial corresponds to the refusal to engage with the unceded sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples or acknowledge Indigenous resistance. Language is integral to the ways in which dominant populations come to “know” and present the so-called “Other”. Such language is reflected in digital media, which both produce and maintain white anxieties towards race and ethnicity. When part of mainstream vernacular, racialised language – and the value judgments associated with it – often remains in what Moreton-Robinson describes as “invisible regimes of power” (75). Everyday social structures, actions, and habits of thought veil oppressive and discriminatory attitudes that exist under the guise of “normality”. Colonisation and the dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing, being, and doing has fixated itself on creating a normality that associates Indigeneity and darkness with negative and threatening connotations. In doing so, it reinforces power balances that presents an image of white superiority built on the invalidation of Indigeneity and Blackness. White fears and anxieties towards race made explicit through social and digital media are also manifest via subtle but equally pervasive everyday action (Carlson and Frazer; Matamoros-Fernández). Confronting and negotiating such fears becomes a daily reality for many Indigenous people. During the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, which extended to Australia and were linked to deaths in custody and police violence, African American poet Saul Williams reminded his followers of the power of language in constructing racialised fears (saulwilliams). In an Instagram post, Williams draws back the veil of an uncontested normality to ask that we take personal responsibility over the words we use. He writes: here’s a tip: Take the words DARK or BLACK in connection to bad, evil, ominous or scary events out of your vocabulary. We learn the stock market crashed on Black Monday, we read headlines that purport “Dark Days Ahead”. There’s “dark” or “black” humour which implies an undertone of evil, and then there are people like me who grow up with dark skin having to make sense of the English/American lexicon and its history of “fair complexions” – where “fair” can mean “light; blond.” OR “in accordance with rules or standards; legitimate.” We may not be fully responsible for the duplicitous evolution of language and subtle morphing of inherited beliefs into description yet we are in full command of the words we choose even as they reveal the questions we’ve left unasked. Like the work of Moreton-Robinson and other scholars, Williams implores his followers to take a reflexive position to consider the questions often left unasked. In doing so, he calls for the transcendence of anonymity and engagement with the realities of colonisation – no matter how ugly, confronting, and complicit one may be in its continuation. In the Australian context this means confronting how terms such as “dark”, “darkie”, or “darky” were historically used as derogatory and offensive slurs for Aboriginal peoples. Such language continues to be used today and can be found in the comment sections of social media, online news platforms, and other online forums (Carlson “Love and Hate”). Taking the move to execute personal accountability can be difficult. It can destabilise and reframe the ways in which we understand and interact with the world (Rose 22). For some, however, exposing racism and seemingly mundane aspects of society is taken as a personal attack which is often met with reactionary responses where one remains closed to new insights (Whittaker). This feeds into fears and anxieties pertaining to the perceived loss of power. These fears and anxieties continue to surface through conversations and calls for action on issues such as changing the date of Australia Day, the racialised reporting of news (McQuire), removing of plaques and statues known to be racist, and requests to change placenames and the names of products. For example, in 2020, Australian cheese producer Saputo Dairy Australia changed the name of it is popular brand “Coon” to “Cheer Tasty”. The decision followed a lengthy campaign led by Dr Stephen Hagan who called for the rebranding based on the Coon brand having racist connotations (ABC). The term has its racist origins in the United States and has long been used as a slur against people with dark skin, liking them to racoons and their tendency to steal and deceive. The term “Coon” is used in Australia by settlers as a racist term for referring to Aboriginal peoples. Claims that the name change is example of political correctness gone astray fail to acknowledge and empathise with the lived experience of being treated as if one is dirty, lazy, deceitful, or untrustworthy. Other brand names have also historically utilised racist wording along with imagery in their advertising (Conor). Pear’s soap for example is well-known for its historical use of racist words and imagery to legitimise white rule over Indigenous colonies, including in Australia (Jackson). Like most racial epithets, the power of language lies in how the words reflect and translate into actions that dehumanise others. The words we use matter. The everyday “ordinary” world, including online, is deeply politicised (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”) and comes to reflect attitudes and power imbalances that encourage white people to internalise the falsity that they are superior and should have control over Black people (Conor). Decisions to make social change, such as that made by Saputo Dairy Australia, can manifest into further white anxieties via their ability to force the confrontation of the circumstances that continue to contribute to one’s own prosperity. In other words, to unveil the realities of colonialism and ask the questions that are too often left in the dark. Lived Experiences of Darkness Colonial anxieties and fears are driven by the fact that Black populations in many areas of the world are often characterised as criminals, perpetrators, threats, or nuisances, but are rarely seen as victims. In Australia, the repeated lack of police response and receptivity to concerns of Indigenous peoples expressed during the Black Lives Matter campaign saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets to protest. Protestors at the same time called for the end of police brutality towards Indigenous peoples and for an end to Indigenous deaths in custody. The protests were backed by a heavy online presence that sought to mobilise people in hope of lifting the veil that shrouds issues relating to systemic racism. There have been over 450 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to die in custody since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 (The Guardian). The tragedy of the Indigenous experience gains little attention internationally. The negative implications of being the object of white fear and anxiety are felt by Indigenous and other Black communities daily. The “safety signals” (Daniella Emanuel) adopted by white peoples in response to often irrational perceptions of threat signify how Indigenous and other Black peoples and communities are seen and valued by the hegemony. Memes played out in social media depicting “Karens” – a term that corresponds to caricaturised white women (but equally applicable to men) who exhibit behaviours of entitlement – have increasing been used in media to expose the prevalence of irrational racial fears (also see Wong). Police are commonly called on Indigenous people and other Black people for simply being within spaces such as shopping malls, street corners, parks, or other spaces in which they are considered not to belong (Mohdin). Digital media are also commonly envisioned as a space that is not natural or normal for Indigenous peoples, a notion that maintains narratives of so-called Indigenous primitivity (Carlson and Frazer). Media connotations of darkness as threatening are associated with, and strategically manipulated by, the images that accompany stories about Indigenous peoples and other Black peoples. Digital technologies play significant roles in producing and disseminating the images shown in the media. Moreover, they have a “role in mediating and amplifying old and new forms of abuse, hate, and discrimination” (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas). Daniels demonstrates how social media sites can be spaces “where race and racism play out in interesting, sometimes disturbing, ways” (702), shaping ongoing colonial fears and anxieties over Black peoples. Prominent footballer Adam Goodes, for example, faced a string of attacks after he publicly condemned racism when he was called an “Ape” by a spectator during a game celebrating Indigenous contributions to the sport (Coram and Hallinan). This was followed by a barrage of personal attacks, criticisms, and booing that spread over the remaining years of his football career. When Goodes performed a traditional war dance as a form of celebration during a game in 2015, many turned to social media to express their outrage over his “confrontational” and “aggressive” behaviour (Robinson). Goodes’s affirmation of his Indigeneity was seen by many as a threat to their own positionality and white sensibility. Social media were therefore used as a mechanism to control settler narratives and maintain colonial power structures by framing the conversation through a white lens (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”). Indigenous peoples in other highly visible fields have faced similar backlash. In 1993, Elaine George was the first Aboriginal person to feature on the cover of Vogue magazine, a decision considered “risky” at the time (Singer). The editor of Vogue later revealed that the cover was criticised by some who believed George’s skin tone was made to appear lighter than it actually was and that it had been digitally altered. The failure to accept a lighter skin colour as “Aboriginal” exposes a neglect to accept ethnicity and Blackness in all its diversity (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”; Carlson “Love and Hate”). Where Adam Goodes was criticised for his overt expression of Blackness, George was critisised for not being “black enough”. It was not until seventeen years later that another Aboriginal model, Samantha Harris, was featured on the cover of Vogue (Marks). While George inspired and pathed the way for those to come, Harris experienced similar discrimination within the industry and amongst the public (Carson and Ky). Singer Jessica Mauboy (in Hornery) also explains how her identity was managed by others. She recalls, I was pretty young when I first received recognition, and for years I felt as though I couldn't show my true identity. What I was saying in public was very dictated by other people who could not handle my sense of culture and identity. They felt they had to take it off my hands. Mauboy’s experience not only demonstrates how Blackness continues to be seen as something to “handle”, but also how power imbalances play out. Scholar Chelsea Watego offers numerous examples of how this occurs in different ways and arenas, for example through relationships between people and within workplaces. Bargallie’s scholarly work also provides an understanding of how Indigenous people experience racism within the Australian public service, and how it is maintained through the structures and systems of power. The media often represents communities with large Indigenous populations as being separatist and not contributing to wider society and problematic (McQuire). Violence, and the threat of violence, is often presented in media as being normalised. Recently there have been calls for an increased police presence in Alice Springs, NT, and other remotes communities due to ongoing threats of “tribal payback” and acts of “lawlessness” (Sky News Australia; Hildebrand). Goldberg uses the phrase “Super/Vision” to describe the ways that Black men and women in Black neighbourhoods are continuously and erroneously supervised and surveilled by police using apparatus such as helicopters and floodlights. Simone Browne demonstrates how contemporary surveillance practices are rooted in anti-black domination and are operationalised through a white gaze. Browne uses the term “racializing surveillance” to describe a ”technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’” (16). The outcome is often discriminatory treatment to those negatively racialised by such surveillance. Narratives that associate Indigenous peoples with darkness and danger fuel colonial fears and uphold the invisible regimes of power by instilling the perception that acts of surveillance and the restrictions imposed on Indigenous peoples’ autonomy are not only necessary but justified. Such myths fail to contextualise the historic colonial factors that drive segregation and enable a forgetting that negates personal accountability and complicity in maintaining colonial power imbalances (Riggs and Augoustinos). Inayatullah and Blaney (165) write that the “myth we construct calls attention to a darker, tragic side of our ethical engagement: the role of colonialism in constituting us as modern actors.” They call for personal accountability whereby one confronts the notion that we are both products and producers of a modernity rooted in a colonialism that maintains the misguided notion of white supremacy (Wolfe; Mignolo; Moreton-Robinson). When Indigenous and other Black peoples enter spaces that white populations don’t traditionally associate as being “natural” or “fitting” for them (whether residential, social, educational, a workplace, online, or otherwise), alienation, discrimination, and criminalisation often occurs (Bargallie; Mohdin; Linhares). Structural barriers are erected, prohibiting career or social advancement while making the space feel unwelcoming (Fredericks; Bargallie). In workplaces, Indigenous employees become the subject of hyper-surveillance through the supervision process (Bargallie), continuing to make them difficult work environments. This is despite businesses and organisations seeking to increase their Indigenous staff numbers, expressing their need to change, and implementing cultural competency training (Fredericks and Bargallie). As Barnwell correctly highlights, confronting white fears and anxieties must be the responsibility of white peoples. When feelings of shock or discomfort arise when in the company of Indigenous peoples, one must reflexively engage with the reasons behind this “fear of the dark” and consider that perhaps it is they who are self-segregating. Mohdin suggests that spaces highly populated by Black peoples are best thought of not as “black spaces” or “black communities”, but rather spaces where white peoples do not want to be. They stand as reminders of a failed colonial regime that sought to deny and dehumanise Indigenous peoples and cultures, as well as the continuation of Black resistance and sovereignty. Conclusion In working towards improving relationships between Black and white populations, the truths of colonisation, and its continuing pervasiveness in local and global settings must first be confronted. In this article we have discussed the association of darkness with instinctual fears and negative responses to the unknown. White populations need to reflexively engage and critique how they think, act, present, address racism, and respond to Indigenous peoples (Bargallie; Moreton-Robinson; Whittaker), cultivating a “decolonising consciousness” (Bradfield) to develop new habits of thinking and relating. To overcome fears of the dark, we must confront that which remains unknown, and the questions left unasked. This means exposing racism and power imbalances, developing meaningful relationships with Indigenous peoples, addressing structural change, and implementing alternative ways of knowing and doing. Only then may we begin to embody Megan Cope’s message, “I’m not afraid of the Dark”. Acknowledgements We thank Dr Debbie Bargallie for her feedback on our article, which strengthened the work. References ABC News. 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From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. 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Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.