Journal articles: 'Swedes in Chicago' – Grafiati (2024)

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The first recorded visit to Grímsvötn occurred on the 31st of August 1919. Two Swedish geology students, Hakon Wadell and Erik Ygberg, stood on the edge of a hitherto unknown large caldera. This discovery was the most significant finding in the first west-to-east transect across Vatnajökull, starting at Síðujökull on the 27th of August. This was an expedition into the unknown, but a principal aim was nevertheless to find the source of the large jökulhlaups on Skeiðarársandur. They named the ice-filled caldera “Svíagígur”. Studies of written sources in the 1930s revealed that this place was indeed Grímsvötn, well known in the 17th and 18th centuries but the name and location had been forgotten in the 19th century. From Svíagígur they continued eastwards, descending down the crevassed Heinabergsjökull, reaching civilization in the morning the 6th. They announced the news that a huge volcano existed under Vatnajökull and this was the source of the jökulhlaups emerging from Skeiðarárjökull. Upon their return to Stockholm, they received a hero’s welcome, but soon it all changed into no one believing them, as prominent figures in Sweden at this time insisted that a volcano can’t be active beneath a glacier! After they finished their studies, both left Sweden very disappointed. Hakon Wadell had a successful geological career in America presenting a doctoral thesis in 1932 from the University of Chicago. Erik Ygberg worked as an international prospector a few years before his bad health, a result of the hardships experienced at the end of the Vatnajökull expedition, forced him back to Sweden, where he had a career at the Swedish Geological Survey. The name Svíagígur has not been used but the two nunataks marking the highest points on Grímsfjall are named in the honour of the two Swedes, Svíahúkur eystri and Svíahnúkur vestri.

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This study of the three large Swedish-language weeklies in Chicago examines how they covered the city’s African-American community during the latter half of the 1910s, a time when blacks migrated to the North in huge numbers. In Chicago, the result was that the African-American population almost tripled between 1910 and 1920. Little of that was visible in the columns of the weeklies, however, with only a handful of items telling readers that blacks were arriving in record numbers. What news there was about African-Americans, moreover, tended to portray them as criminals. Consequently, the riots that shook Chicago in late July 1919 seemed to take the editors of the weeklies by surprise. A major explanation for the Swedish weeklies’ coverage was that they relied almost exclusively on the city’s English-language dailies for news that did not concern their own ethnic group and thus mirrored the negative way the dailies portrayed African-Americans.

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Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), xii + 209 pp.Kirsten Haack, The United Nations Democracy Agenda: A Conceptual History (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), 256 pp.Pasi Ihalainen, Agents of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), xvi + 532 pp.Jeppe Nevers, Fra skældsord til slagord. Demokratibegrebet i dansk politisk historie [From term of abuse to catchphrase: The concept of democracy in Danish political history] (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2011), 225 pp.

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Relativization is a widespread syntactic and pragmatic strategy, found in such di­ verse languages as Arabic and Korean, Nahuatl and German (The Chicago Which Which Hunt 1972). It is a process of modifier formation producing relative clauses (RC), which can serve several pragmatic functions, such as supplying new informa­ tion, emphasis, cohesion etc. RCs have been much studied and they still offer intere­ sting linguistic insights. Alongside the obviously common features many differences in detail can be observed even among closely related languages. The differences as well as the similarities can be of a syntactic or a stylistic nature. Out of the many in­ teresting aspects of RC structure and usage a closer look will be taken only at the choice of the linking word and some rules governing its place and function.

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When I was a doctoral student in health care administration at the University of Chicago, I worked with Odin Anderson, who introduced me to Osier Peterson and Bjprn Smedby. Odin first took me to Sweden in 1966. In early 1970, I met Lee Lusted and heard about clinical decision analysis. My interests, then as now, were the costs and outcomes of hospital care, although the methods I have used to address these problems have varied over time.

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The editor of the Business History Review has asked me, as the oldest “new” economic historian, to make a comment on the 1993 Nobel Prize award in Economics—a comment directed to “real” historians—which I am not—and especially to business historians, of whose product I have been an often satisfied—though occasionally restless—consumer. Needless to say, I find this to be an assignment difficult to fulfill. Praise will be put down to “trendy” insincerity and criticism to jealousy. Nor will Historians miss the irony in all the excitement generated by the award within a sub-tribe whose main charge has been to minimize the biographical, the “human” element in historical explanation. The self-styled “new” economic history movement, christened half-jokingly as early as 1968 by an ingenious neologism, “Cliometrics,” was now, twenty-five years later, awarded what is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Honor of Alfred Nobel, in the persons of two of its very keen and most prolific, best-known, energetic, and indomitable practitioners, Douglass C. North of Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.) and Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago (Chicago, Ill.). Surely there is some lesson in marketing in all this to make business and entrepreneurial historians sit up and take notice.

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The studies reported in this volume of WL&L (5: 1–2, 2002) all derive from a joint project entitled “Developing literacy in different contexts and in different languages”, funded by the Spencer Foundation, Chicago. The study encompasses seven languages — Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Icelandic, Spanish, and Swedish — for which data were collected in Europe, Israel, and the US by graduate research assistants in education, linguistics, and psychology, under the supervision of a project director in each country — each of whom is listed as a first or “lead” author in the articles which follow the introduction to this collection.

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August Davis (1852–1936) led a group of Swedish Free Mission Friends in America known as the Free-Free, an early branch of what is today the Evangelical Free Church of America. Davis and his followers were known for such phenomena as falling down in the Spirit, having ecstatic visions, uttering unintelligible sounds, communicating the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands, and teaching the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a second work of grace. Such activities occurred mostly in Chicago, Illinois, and throughout western Minnesota between 1885 and 1900. Davis and the Free-Free had direct organizational ties in the Scandinavian Mission Society U.S.A. to emerging Swedish-American Pentecostals in Minnesota and South Dakota such as John Thompson, Mary Johnson, and Jacob Bakken. This group known pejoratively as the Free-Free is another of several impulses that birthed a distinctly Pentecostal form of Christianity in America.

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Night is falling in the city. Holiday shoppers bustle down the sidewalk, some pausing to gaze at a colorful billboard publicizing the delights of an upcoming exposition. A few crafty rats scamper along a tall wooden fence, stalked by a sinister ratcatcher of the Dickensian mold. Children frolic, fight, and tease one another in front of the fence, the familiar syncopated strains of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker overture underscoring their exuberant street play. This is not, however, the early 1800s Germany of the upper-class Stahlbaum family. It's 1892 Chicago. In the Joffrey Ballet's 2016 production of The Nutcracker, the story of Clara Stahlbaum's innocent Christmas Eve dalliances with an anthropomorphic nutcracker and their journey to the Land of Sweets becomes the story of Marie, the daughter of a Polish immigrant single mother, whose fantasyland is the future Chicago World's Fair. Marie's mother, we learn, is a hired artist working on the fair's sculptures. Marie, Fritz, and their mother inhabit a wooden shack in the heart of the construction site, surrounded by the skeletal structures that will become the White City's buildings. Drosselmeyer is now “The Great Impresario,” a character of vision and magnetism inspired by the fair's Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham, and Marie's working-class mother transforms in the second act into the embodiment of the fair's golden Statue of the Republic, a less saccharine substitute for the Sugar Plum Fairy. The mutual affection of Mother and The Great Impresario spans both acts, and though the ballet leaves unclear the outcome of their budding romance, in it young Marie sees the promise of her American dream: a contented nuclear family.

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This special issue is the outcome of a generous invitation by the Center for Islamic Studies of Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio, to arrange a seminar on Nordic Islam at Youngstown State and to publish the proceedings in the Center’s journal, Studies in Contemporary Islam. To make the proceedings available to Nordic audiences, the proceedings are also being published in the Tidsskrift for Islamforskning. The seminar was held on 25–26 October 2010, and was highly rewarding. The contributors are grateful for the hospitality they received during their stay in Youngstown. They are also grateful to Professor Rhys Williams, Director of the McNamara Center for the Social Study of Religion at Loyola University Chicago, for contributing to the seminar and the special issue. Rhys Williams’ perspective is that of an experienced researcher of religion in the USA, and represents the logical opposite of the Nordic state model and its way of organizing welfare, civil society, and religion. Dr. Williams’ perspective helps to highlight the specifics of the Nordic context. Last but not least, the contributors wish to thank the editors of the Tidsskrift for Islamforskning.The fact that this special issue about Islamic institutions and values in the context of the Nordic welfare state is intended for both American and Nordic readers has inspired the framework that introduces the issue. The first three contributions constitute one group, as they each deal with the significance that the two different welfare and civil society models represented by the Nordic countries and the USA may have for the institutionalization of Islam and Muslims’ public presence and values. First, Ulrika Mårtensson provides a historical survey of the Nordic welfare state and its developments, including debates about the impact of neoliberal models and (de)secularization. This survey is followed by Rhys Williams’ contribution on US civil society and its implications for American Muslims, identifying the significant differences between the US and the Nordic welfare and civil society models. The third contribution, by Tuomas Martikainen, is a critical response to two US researchers who unfavorably contrast European ‘religion-hostile’ management of religion and Islam with US ‘religion-friendly’ approaches. Martikainen , with reference to Finland, that globalized neoliberal ‘new public management’ and ‘governance’ models have transformed Finland into a ‘postsecular society’ that is much more accommodating of religion and Islam than the US researchers claim.The last seven contributions are all concerned with the ‘public’ dimensions of Nordic Islam and with relations between public and Islamic institutions and values. In the Danish context, Mustafa Hussain presents a quantitative study of relations between Muslim and non-Muslim residents in Nørrebro, a part of Copenhagen, the capital, which is often portrayed in the media as segregated and inhabited by ‘not well integrated’ Muslims. Hussain demonstrates that, contrary to media images, Nørrebro’s Muslim inhabitants feel that strong ties bind them to their neighborhood and to non-Muslims, and they trust the municipality and the public institutions, with one important exception, that of the public schools.From the horizon of the Norwegian capital, Oslo, Oddbjørn Leirvik explores public discourses on Islam and values with reference to national and Muslim identity and interreligious dialogue; Leirvik has personal experience of the latter since its start in 1993. From the Norwegian city of Trondheim, Eli-Anne Vongraven Eriksen and Ulrika Mårtensson chart the evolution of a pan-Islamic organization Muslim Society Trondheim (MST) from a prayer room for university students to the city’s main jami‘ mosque and Muslim public representative. The analytical focus is on dialogue as an instrument of civic integration, applied to the MST’s interactions with the church and the city’s public institutions. A contrasting case is explored in Ulrika Mårtensson’s study of a Norwegian Salafi organization, whose insistence on scriptural commands and gender segregation prevents its members from fully participating in civic organizational activities, which raises questions about value-driven conditions for democratic participation.In the Swedish context, Johan Cato and Jonas Otterbeck explore circ*mstances determining Muslims’ political participation through associations and political parties. They show that when Muslims make public claims related to their religion, they are accused of being ‘Islamists’, i.e., mixing religion and politics, which in the Swedish public sphere is a strong discrediting charge that limits the Muslims’ sphere of political action in an undemocratic manner. Next, Anne Sofie Roald discusses multiculturalism’s implications for women in Sweden, focusing on the role of ‘Swedish values’ in Muslims’ public deliberations about the Shari‘a and including the evolution of Muslims’ values from first- to second-generation immigrants. Addressing the question of how Swedish Islamic schools teach ‘national values’ as required by the national curriculum, Jenny Berglund provides an analysis of the value-contents of Islamic religious education based on observation of teaching practices. In the last article, Göran Larsson describes the Swedish state investigation (2009) of the need for a national training program for imams requested by the government as well as by some Muslims. The investigation concluded that there was no need for the state to put such programs in place, and that Muslims must look to the experiences of free churches and other religious communities and find their own ways to educate imams for service in Sweden.

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Jules M Rothstein, clinician, researcher, educator, author, and speaker, entered into the field of physical therapy in 1975 following graduation from the Department of Physical Therapy at New York University. He completed his Master of Arts Degree in Kinesiology in 1979 and his Doctor of Philosophy in Physical Therapy in 1983, also at New York University. During his training, he worked as Staff Physical Therapist at Peninsula Hospital Center in Queens, as Research Fellow with the Arthritis Foundation, and in private practice in Cedarhurst, New York. From 1977 to 1980, Dr Rothstein was Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Physical Therapy at New York University. From 1980 to 1983, he was Instructor and Coordinator of Clinical Research and Training Programs at Washington University School of Medicine, and from 1984 to 1990, he was Associate Professor at the Medical College of Virginia. A tenured professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1990, Dr Rothstein also served as Head of the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and as Chief of Physical Therapy Services at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago until 1999. During that period, the department obtained more than $6 million in research funding and received APTA's 1997 Minority Initiative Award for consistently recruiting and maintaining ethnic and racial diversity among its students. He continues to serve as Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy and remains active in all areas of physical therapy, practice, research, and service. Dr Rothstein's expertise in measurement and research design has been used by many professionals—across disciplines—in the allied health community. He is in great demand as an invited guest speaker, having given professional presentations and keynote speeches on the topic of rehabilitation sciences at numerous national and international forums, including Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. He has also served as a consultant and visiting professor in South Africa, the Netherlands, and Poland. Dr Rothstein has made extensive contributions to the physical therapy profession's body of knowledge, including the publication of more than 60 refereed articles and abstracts. In 1985, he edited the text Measurement in Physical Therapy. He chaired the APTA Task Force on Standards for Measurement in Physical Therapy that produced the first APTA Standards for Tests and Measurements in Physical Therapy Practice in 1993. As part of that task force, he co-authored the Primer on Measurement: An Introductory Guide to Measurements Issues. Since 1989, Dr Rothstein has served as Editor of Physical Therapy and has been appointed to that position for three 5-year terms by the APTA Board of Directors. Dr Rothstein is a Catherine Worthingham Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Golden Pen Award, the Outstanding Service Award for Research, the Outstanding Service Award for Continuing Education, and the Outstanding Therapist Award in the State of Illinois. [Rothstein JM. Thirty-Second Mary McMillan Lecture: Journeys beyond the horizon. Phys Ther. 2001;81:1817–1829.]

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IntroductionIt is a well known fact that qualified health professionals generally migrate to high-income, developed regions. Nevertheless, the perceptions of this immigrant skilled health workforce on access to opportunities or feeling discriminated in their host countries, have not yet been explored or adequately addressed.ObjectivesThis work has focused on the perceptions of immigrant psychiatry trainees in several European countries about their views on having equal access to opportunities as natives or feeling discriminated.MethodsA semi-structured 61-item questionnaire was circulated by National Coordinators in each country and was completed by 2281 psychiatric trainees from 33 European countries between year 2013 and 2014. Data has been analysed using the Software Package for Social Sciences for Windows v. 22.0 (SPSS Inc. Chicago, IL).ResultsIn these findings, more than one in ten psychiatry trainees across Europe were immigrants, with top host countries being Switzerland, Sweden and UK. Satisfaction with migration and the perception of having equal opportunities as the native trainees varied depending on the host country they migrated to. More than one-third of the trainees felt discriminated, not having the same opportunities as the local colleagues, especially concerning the work opportunities and the academic conditions. Still, nearly two-thirds considered having the same opportunities than natives.ConclusionsA high number of immigrant psychiatry trainees subjectively feels they do not have the same opportunities as local trainees. Further research about factual and perceived discrimination by immigrant workforce should be done.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

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AbstractEvaluation of other cultures is a strong force in a culture’s definition of itself. Cultures are formed in encounters that include domination, conflict, and dismissal as much as appreciation and smooth exchange. In this paper, the construction of cultural identity is discussed, with reference to a Scandinavian Theme Park proposal made in cooperation between American design consultants and a local Swedish team of planners and visionaries. The image production in this design proposal, which never came to be realised in architectural production, shows that “Scandinavia” appears as a two-some dialogic construction that adopts stereotyped cultural identities, and that it was not brought to any wider public dialogue. In a semiotic account of this architectural decision-making, models of culture (Lotman. 1990. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. London: Tauris.) are discussed in terms of the tripartition of culture into Ego-culture, Alter-culture and Alius-culture (Sonesson. 2000. Ego meets alter: The meaning of otherness in cultural semiotics. Semiotica 128(3/4). 537–559.; Cabak Rédei, Anna. 2007. An inquiry into cultural semiotics: Germaine de Staël’s autobiographical travel accounts. Lund: Lund University Press.), considered as a basic abstracted backdrop of what is meant by cultural difference. In this paper it is suggested that this tripartite view on culture, can be further discussed in reflection of post-colonial studies, notably through terms such as “mimicry” (Bhabha. 1984. Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. October 28. 125–133.) and “subalterity” (Spivak. 1988. Can the subaltern speak?. In Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture, 271–313. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.). The model of culture can furthermore be discussed through Peirce’s distinction between different stages and carriers of representation, adding to the cultural model an understanding of what it means, over time, for a culture to relate to an admired as well as to a neglected other cultural actor.

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06–840Ermida, Isabel (U Minho, Braga, Portugal; iermida@ilch.uminho.pt), Linguistic mechanisms of power in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Applying politeness theory to Orwell's world. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.6 (2006), 842–862.06–841Fulda, Joseph S. (New York, USA; fulda@acm.org), Abstracts from logical form: An experimental study of the nexus between language and logic I. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.5 (2006), 778–807.06–842Fulda, Joseph S. (New York, USA; fulda@acm.org), Abstracts from logical form: An experimental study of the nexus between language and logic II. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.6 (2006), 925–943.06–843Giora, Rachel (Tel Aviv U, Israel; giorar@post.tau.ac.il), Anything negatives can do affirmatives can do just as well, except for some metaphors. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.7 (2006), 981–1014.06–844Hasson, Uri (U Chicago, USA; uhasson@uchicago.edu) & Sam Glucksberg, Does understanding negation entail affirmation? An examination of negated metaphors. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.7 (2006), 1015–1032.06–845Heinemann, Trine (U Uppsala, Sweden; Trine.Heinemann@nordiska.uu.se), ‘Will you or can't you?’: Displaying entitlement in interrogative requests. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.7 (2006), 1081–1104.06–846Kaup, Barbara (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany; Barbara.Kaup@tu-berlin.de), Jana Lüdtke & Rolf A. Z waan, Processing negated sentences with contradictory predicates: is a door that is not open mentally closed?Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.7 (2006), 1033–1050.06–847Lee, EunHee (U Buffalo, USA; ehlee@buffalo.edu), Stative progressives in Korean and English. Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.5 (2006), 695–717.06–848Paradis, Carita (Växjö U, Sweden; Carita.Paradis@vxu.se) & Caroline Willners, Antonymy and negation – the boundednesshypothesis.Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) 38.7 (2006), 1051–1080.

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Most investigations of language use in the computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems colloquially known as 'chat rooms' are based on studies of chat rooms in which English is the predominant language. This study begins to redress that bias by investigating language use in a Swedish text-based chat room. Do Swedish chat participants just adopt strategies adapted to suit the needs of written online conversation, or is Swedish written language being developed in analogy with adaptations that can be observed in 'international' chat rooms? As is now well known, text-based chat rooms provide a means for people to converse in near real time with very little delay between messages. As a written form of interaction, there is no possibility of sending simultaneous non-verbal information, and while the minimal delay gives the interaction a more conversational feel, the conversants must struggle with the time pressure of combining a slow message production system with rapid transmission-reception. Several strategies have been developed in order to ease the strain of writing and to convey more information than written symbols normally allow (Werry; Witmer & Katzman; Hård af Segerstad, "Emoticons"). A number of strategies have been developed to suit the needs of CMC, some of which we recognise from traditional writing, but perhaps use more generously in the new environment. Well known and internationally recognised strategies used to compensate for the lack of non-verbal or non-vocal signals include providing analogies for vocalisations adopted in order to compensate for the effort of typing and time pressure: Smileys (or emoticons): Smileys are combinations of keyboard characters which attempt to resemble facial expressions, eg. ;) (or simple objects such as roses). These are mostly placed at the end of a sentence as an aid to interpret the emotional state of the sender; Surrounding words with *asterisks* (or a number of variants, such as underscores (_word_)). As with smileys, asterisks may be used to indicate the emotional state of the sender (eg. *smiles*, *s*), and also to convey an action (*waves*, *jumps up and down*); In some systems, different fonts and colours may be used to express emotions. Capitals, unorthodox spelling and mixing of cases in the middle of words and Extreme use of punctuation marks may all be used to convey analogies to prosodic phenomena such as intonation, tone of voice, emphasis ("you IDIOT"); Abbreviations and acronyms: some are traditional, others new to the medium; Omission of words: ellipsis, grammatical function words; and, Little correction of typographical errors -- orthography or punctuation -- and little traditional use of mixed cases (eg. capitals at the beginning of sentences), and punctuation. Method This study compares and contrasts data from a questionnaire and material from a logged chat channel. The investigation began with a questionnaire, inquiring into the habits and preferences of Swedish students communicating on the Internet. 333 students (164 females and 169 males) answered the questionnaire that was sent to five upper secondary schools (students aged 16-18), and two lower secondary schools (students aged 13-15). Subjects were asked for three kinds of information: (a) examples of the strategies mentioned above and whether they used these when chatting online, (b) which languages were used in everyday communication and in chat rooms, and (c) the names of favourite chat rooms. One of the most popular public chat rooms turned out to be one maintained by a Swedish newspaper. Permission was obtained to log material from this chat room. The room may be accessed at: <http://nychat.aftonbladet.se/webchat/oppenkanal/Entren.php>. A 'bot (from 'robot', a program that can act like a user on an IRC network) was used to log the time, sender and content of contributions in the room. In order to get a large data set and to record the spread of activity over the most part of a week, approximately 120 hours of logging occurred, six days and nights in succession. During this period 4 293 users ('unique pseudonyms'), from 278 different domains provided 47 715 contributions in total (410 355 total utterances). The logged material was analysed, using the automated search tool TRASA (developed by Leif Gronqvist -- Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden). Results The language used in the chat room was mainly Swedish. Apart from loan words (in some cases with the English spelling intact, in other cases adapted to Swedish spelling), English phrases (often idiomatic) showed up occasionally, sometimes in the middle of a Swedish sentence. Some examples of contributions are shown, extracted from their original context. (Note: Instances of Nordic letters in the examples have been transformed into the letters 'a' and 'o' respectively.) Table 1. Examples of nicknames and contributions taken from the Web chat material. 01.07.20 Darth Olsson Helloo allibadi hur e de i dag? 14:44:40 G.B Critical information check 01.11.40 Little Boy Lost fru hjarterdam...120 mil busstripp...Later hojdare om det...;) 18.10.30 PeeWee this sucks 22.17.12 Ellen (16) Whatever! 16.06.55 Blackboy Whats up The above examples demonstrate that both nicknames and contributions consist of a mix either of Swedish and English, or of pure English. In answering the questionnaire, the subjects gave many examples of the more 'traditional strategies' used in international chat channels for overcoming the limitations of writing: traditional abbreviations, the use of all uppercase, asterisk-framed words, extreme use of punctuation and the simplest smileys (Hård af Segerstad, "Emoticons", "Expressing Emoticons", "Strategies" and "Swedish Teenagers"). The questionnaire results also included examples of 'net-abbreviations' based on English words. However, while these were similar to those observed in international chat rooms, the most interesting finding was that Swedish teenagers do not just copy that behaviour from the international chat rooms that they have visited: the examples of creative and new abbreviations are made up in comparison with the innovative English net-abbreviations, but based on Swedish words. A number of different types of abbreviations emerged: Acronyms made up from the first letters in a phrase (eg. "istf", meaning "i stallet for" [trans. "instead of"]); Numbers representing the sound value of a syllable in combination with letters (eg. "3vligt" meaning "trevligt" [trans. "nice"]); and, Letters representing the sound value of a syllable in combination with other letters forming an abbreviated representation of a word (eg. "CS" meaning "(vi) ses" [trans. "see (you)"]). The logged chat material showed that all of the strategies, both Swedish and English, mentioned in the questionnaire were actually used online. The Swedish strategies mentioned in the questionnaire are illustrated in Table 2. Table 2. Examples of innovative and traditional Swedish abbreviations given in the questionnaire. Innovative Abbreviation Full phrase Translation Traditional abbreviation Full phrase Translation Asg Asgarvar Laughs hard ngn nagon someone Iofs i och for sig Strictly speaking Ngra nagra some ones iaf, if i allafall Anyway gbg Göteborg Göteborg É Ar Is sv svenska Swedish D Det It bla bland annat among other things Cs (vi) ses See you t.ex. till exempel for example Lr Eller Or ngt nagot something B.S.D.V Bara Sa Du Vet Just To Let You Know t.om till och med even P Pa On, at etc et cetera QL (ql) Kul Fun m.m med mera and more 3vligt Trevligt Nice m.a.o. med andra ord in other words Tebax Tillbaka Back mkt mycket a lot Oxa Ocksa Too ibl Ibland sometimes The table above shows examples of traditional and creative abbreviations developed to suit the limitations and advantages of written Swedish online. A comparison of the logged material with the examples given in the questionnaire shows that all innovative abbreviations exemplified were used, sometimes with slightly different orthography. Table 3. The most frequent abbreviations used in the chat material No. of occurrences Innovative Abbreviations No. of occurrences Traditional abbreviations 224 Oxa 74 GBG 101 Oki 60 gbg 62 Oki 56 ngn 47 É 43 mm 16 P 42 Gbg 10 Iofs 37 ngt 10 If 26 bla 10 D 19 tex 5 Tebax 19 Tom 5 OKI 18 etc 4 É 8 MM 4 Ql 6 Ngn 4 P 5 BLA 4 OXA 4 tom 4 D 4 NGN 3 Asg 4 Mm 3 IF 3 TEX 2 Oxa 2 TOM 1 Cs 2 Ngt 1 Tebax 1 ngra 1 QL 1 bLA 1 If 1 ASG The limited space of this article does not allow for a full analysis of the material from the chat, but in short, data from both the questionnaire and the Web chat of this study suggest that Swedish teenagers conversing in electronic chat rooms draw on their previous knowledge of strategies used in traditional written language to minimise time and effort when writing/typing (cf. Ferrara et al.). They do not just copy behaviour and strategies that they observe in international chat rooms that they have visited, but adapt these to suit the Swedish language. As well as saving time and effort typing, and apart from conveying non-verbal information, it would appear that these communication strategies are also used as a way of signalling and identifying oneself as 'cyber-regulars' -- people who know the game, so to speak. At this stage of research, beyond the use of Swedish language by Swedish nationals, there is nothing to indicate that the adaptations found are significantly different to online adaptations of English or French (cf. Werry). This result calls for further research on the specifics of Swedish adaptations. References Allwood, Jens. "An Activity Based Approach to Pragmatics." Gothenburg Papers in Theoretical Linguistics 76. Dept. of Linguistics, University of Göteborg, 1995. Ferrara, K., H. Brunner, and G. Whittemore. "Interactive Written Discourse as an Emergent Register." Written Communication 8.1 (1991): 8-34. Hård af Segerstad, Ylva. "Emoticons -- A New Mode for the Written Language." Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden. Unpublished paper, 1998. ---. "Expressing Emotions in Electronic Writing." Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden. Unpublished paper, 1998. ---. "Strategies in Computer-Mediated Written Communication -- A Comparison between Two User Groups." Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden. Unpublished paper, 1998. ---. "Swedish Teenagers' Written Conversation in Electronic Chat Environments." WebTalk -- Writing As Conversation. Ed. Diane Penrod. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Forthcoming. Witmer, Diane, and Sandra Lee Katzman. "On-Line Smiles: Does Gender Make A Difference in the Use of Graphic Accents?" Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2.4 (1997). 19 Aug. 2000 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue4/witmer1.php>. Werry, Christopher, C. "Linguistic and Interactional Features of Internet Relay Chat." Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Susan Herring. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996. 47-63. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ylva Hård af Segerstad. "Swedish Chat Rooms." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/swedish.php>. Chicago style: Ylva Hård af Segerstad, "Swedish Chat Rooms," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/swedish.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ylva Hård af Segerstad. (2000) Swedish chat rooms. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/swedish.php> ([your date of access]).

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Objective: Anemia bears a high global prevalence with about 1.6 billion people living with this affliction. Malaysia carries the burden of 13.8% anemia prevalence which urges for extensive research directed to its prediction and amelioration. This is the first study that aims to (a) propose simple non-invasive predictive anthropometric markers and their specific cut-off values for early prediction of anemia among the young adults in Malaysia, (b) provide anemia prevalence based on both gender and ethnicity among young adults of Malaysia.Method: The present cross-sectional study included 245 participants (113 men and 132 women) aged between 18 and 30 years. Anthropometric parameters were measured following the standard protocols. Blood samples were collected and hemoglobin levels were determined using the HemoCue haemoglobinometer (Hb 201+ System, Angelhom, Sweden) to detect the presence of anemia. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve was employed to assess and compare the efficacy of anthropometric indices in the prediction of anemia. Data were analyzed using SPSS (v. 22.0, IBM, Chicago, IL, USA) and MedCalc (v. 19.05, Ostend, Belgium).Result: The ROC analysis indicates that body mass index (BMI) is the best anthropometric marker with the highest area under the curve (AUC) and specificity (SP) for predicting the presence of anemia in young adults in Malaysia. Thus, the study proposes the optimal cut-off value of BMI for young men of Malaysia as 20.65 kg/m2 (AUC: 0.889) and young women of Malaysia as 19.7 kg/m2 (AUC: 0.904). The study also reports that Malaysian Indians have the highest prevalence of anemia (26.22%) followed by Malays (21.54%), “Others” (indigenous ethnic group) (20%), and Chinese (14.5%), with an overall higher prevalence of anemia in young adult women (21.96%) than in men (18.6%) of Malaysia.Conclusion: The proposed anemia-predictive anthropometric markers with optimal cut-off values will aid early detection of anemia among young adults in Malaysia, and given its simple, inexpensive, and intelligible approach, it can be widely used. The ease of anemia prediction together with the reported distribution of anemia prevalence based on gender and ethnicity will facilitate in gauging the necessary extent of strategies of anemia management in the young adult population of Malaysia.

Abstract:

Editors' Preface When Ulf Wilhelmsson first contacted us about including his "Dialogue on Film and Philosophy" in the M/C 'chat' issue, we were initially taken aback. True, the notion of chat surely must include that of 'dialogue', but Wilhelmsson's idea, as he put it to us, was that of a Socratic dialogue about film. The dialogue "Film och Filosofi" already existed in Swedish, but he had done an initial rough translation of the dialogue on his Website. Since Wilhelmsson put this to us in the very early days of the submission period, we decided to have a look. Wilhelmsson had omitted to mention the fact that his dialogue was amusing as well as informative. Playing Socrates was ... Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino was not just discussing film, but he was moderating a hefty grab-bag of influential philosphers, film-makers, film-scholars and the odd Beatle (John Lennon). Furthermore, creeping in to many of the utterances in the discussion was Wilhelmsson's take on Tarantino's vernacular -- keep an eye out for "Bada boom bada boom, get it?" and "Oh Sartre. Dude, I would also like to provide a similar example". The philosphers sometimes also get a chance to break out of their linguistic bonds, such as Herakleit, who tells us that "War is the primogenitor of the whole shebang". Occasionally, Wilhelmsson lets his conversants get rowdy (St Thomas of Aquinas and Aristotle yell "Tabula Rasa!" in unison), put on accents (Michel Chion with French accent: "Merci merci. Je vous en pris that you are recognising tse sound"), be "dead sure of themselves" (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson; Noam Chomsky thanks us for our attention) and wander in and out of the dialogue's virtual space (at the end, Immanuel Kant returns to us after his daily walk around town). Unfortunately, due to its length, the dialogue can not be supplied in regular M/C 'bits', and so we have made it available as a downloadable Rich Text Format file. Felicity Meakins & E. Sean Rintel -- M/C 'chat' co-editors Download "Dialogue on Film and Philosophy" in Rich Text Format: Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ulf Wilhelmsson. "Dialogue on Film and Philosophy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/dialogue.php>. Chicago style: Ulf Wilhelmsson, "Dialogue on Film and Philosophy," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/dialogue.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ulf Wilhelmsson. (2000) Dialogue on Film and Philosophy. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/dialogue.php> ([your date of access]).

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Abstract Presenting Author Email: jelliott@tcd.ie Research question Does intensive postoperative surveillance after planned curative resection for oesophageal cancer lead to increased detection of oligometastatic disease, facilitating increased use of tumor-directed therapy, hence improving overall survival? Background and aim Emerging data demonstrate long-term survival after salvage interventions for local or oligometastatic recurrence following planned curative resection for oesophageal cancer, providing rationale for postoperative surveillance. While meta-analyses confirm the survival benefit of chemotherapy (HR0.81, 0.71-0.92), and HER-2 directed therapy (HR0.75, 0.68-0.84) for patients with recurrent or metastatic oesophageal cancer, the effect of surveillance on oncologic outcome and health-related quality-of-life (HRQL) is unknown. There is currently no international consensus regarding the utility of surveillance following curative-intent treatment for oesophageal cancer, with divergent guidelines from ESMO, AUGIS and NCCN. A pilot study including 27 European centres (ENSURE-1) demonstrated wide variation in practice, with tumour markers, CT and PET-CT utilised in 4 (14.8%), 10 (37.0%) and 3 (11.1%), respectively. This multicenter collaborative project aims to determine the independent impact of intensive surveillance on recurrence patterns, oncologic outcome, and HRQL in survivorship, providing the first adequately powered study to address this critical research question. Patients A retrospective observational study of patients undergoing treatment with curative intent for oesophageal cancer at participating Centers from June 2009 to June 2015. Inclusion criteria 1. Age 18 years and above 2. Underwent surgery with curative intent for cTxNxM0 esophageal or esophagogastric junction (Siewert type I, II and III) cancer 3. Salvage surgery after failure of primary endoscopic or oncologic treatment will be included Exclusion criteria 1. Endoscopic therapy or definitive oncological treatment as sole therapy for esophageal cancer 2. Missing follow-up data Comparator Outcomes will be compared among patients managed with intensive surveillance (IS) compared with standard surveillance. IS will be defined as the routine use of CT/PET-CT for surveillance, at least annually, for at least the first three postoperative years. Each participating centre will be classified as undertaking IS or standard surveillance (SS) according to data submitted in the pilot study (ENSURE-1). Outcomes The primary endpoint of this study is: • Overall survival The secondary endpoints of this study are: • Disease-specific survival • Observed disease-free survival • HRQL o Prespecified EORTC QLQ-C30, QLQ-OG25 items • Recurrence patterns and treatment o Site of disease at initial recurrence o Oligometastatic disease at initial recurrence o Anastomotic disease at initial recurrence o Palliative chemotherapy, chemoradiation and radiation use o Treatment for oligometastatic and anastomotic recurrence (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy only) Study design Power calculation and sample size Power calculations are based on Sisic et al. demonstrating a 5% increase in 5-year overall survival with standardized follow-up in a propensity score matched analysis. Based on an initial feasibility survey of 18 Centers, current estimated number of cases per year for enrolled Centers is 885, therefore it is anticipated that the 5-year study period should capture approximately 4425 patients, of whom 31% undergo high intensity surveillance with cross-sectional imaging, with a minimum postoperative follow-up of 3 years. Using a log-rank analysis to detect a 5% difference in overall survival with sigma of 0.05, with 1371 of 4425 patients in the IS group, the study is powered to 90.4%, while accounting for a potential 20% exclusion rate, the study is powered to 83.1% with current enrolled Centers. Data collection and study definitions Where possible, data will be collected from prospectively maintained databases at participating Centers. Collected data will be entered into a standardized data collection spreadsheet “ENSURE Study - Datasheet” (attached). Variables will be coded at source by Co-Investigators according to standardized coding. Briefly, collected data will include: • Demographics • Co-morbidities and performance status • Histologic type • Tumor location • Clinical stage and grade • Pathologic stage, grade, treatment response and margins • Neoadjuvant therapy details • Operative details • Overall postoperative morbidity • Recurrence and associated treatment • Survival data • HRQOL o ENSURE database will be linked to include relevant HRQL data from a previous study (LASER) Registration The study has been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT03461341). Statistical Approach Data will be analyzed using SPSS® (v.23.0) software (SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA). For the multivariable analyses, all clinically relevant variables will be inputted into multivariable linear, logistic or Cox proportional hazards regression models. Team and infrastructure An international multidisciplinary collaborative team has been assembled via the Young Investigator Group of the European Society for Diseases of the Esophagus for the conduct of this study, with 27 centres signed up to participate in the pilot study to date. The study will be initiated from St. James's Hospital, Dublin, Ireland; the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden; and Imperial College London, London, England. Steering committee: Jessie Elliott (Dublin), Fredrik Klevebro (Stockholm), Sheraz Markar (London), Lucas Goense (Utrecht), Melody Ni (London – statistician), Pernilla Lagergran (Stockholm – HRQL researcher) Supervisory committee: John V Reynolds (Dublin), Magnus Nilsson (Stockholm), George Hanna (London), Giovanni Zaninotto (Padova). Infrastructure: A dedicated biostatistician (Dr Melody Ni, Imperial College London) is a collaborator on the current project and will provide expertise with respect to design and data analysis. A researcher with expertise in HRQL assessment (Professor Pernilla Lagergren, Karolinska Institute) is also a named collaborator on the present project.

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"For most of us, if we do not talk of ourselves, or at any rate of the individual circles of which we are the centres, we can talk of nothing. I cannot hold with those who wish to put down the insignificant chatter of the world." -- Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage This issue of M/C explores the notion of 'chat', examining its contexts, forms, functions and operations. 'Chat' appears to be a descriptive subset of 'talk', often characterised somewhat unfairly as idle or frivolous 'small talk', 'gossip' -- the kind of tête-à-tête that is mediated through cups of tea (alluded to in Jen Henzell's cover image). However, 'chat' is not only an extremely prevalent activity, but, as Trollope implies, a primary social activity. Serious academic regard for 'chat' can be traced to Malinowski's (150) coining of the term "phatic communion" to refer to talk that expresses the "ties of union", a notion later taken up by Laver ("Communicative Functions"; "Linguistic Routines"). Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson made a similar distinction between the content level of communication (contains assumptions that are communicable) and the relationship level (which reveals the speaker's attitude to the assumptions communicated and the speaker's relationship with and opinion of the hearer). 'Chat', they argue, is more about building and solidifying relationships between interactants than imparting information. Even gossip, probably the most content driven form of 'chat', lets hearers know that they are regarded well enough by the speakers to be drawn into confidence. We have divided the M/C 'chat' issue into two sections along the lines of context. The first section deals with what might be termed 'traditional' or 'more general' forms of chat, where the interactants are either physically (face-to-face) or acoustically (telephone) copresent. Given both the period and the medium in which M/C 'chat' is being published, it should not be surprising that the second section deals with computer-mediated communication (CMC). With the advent of CMC, 'chat' -- and research on it -- has been transformed, taking with it much of the old formula and leaving behind some of its trappings. M/C 'chat' is introduced by Charles Antaki's Feature Article "Two Rhetorical Uses of the Description 'Chat'". In this insightful and highly accessible piece, Antaki explores the paradoxical manner in which the description of a discursive event as 'chat' may be used to socially persuasive ends. Antaki takes as his starting point the fact that some uses of the word 'chat' demonstrate an old-fashioned view of spoken discourse as an inefficient information-transmission system ('mere talk' and 'gossip'). This, he argues, belies -- and belittles -- its use in actual talk. Analyses of four transcripts containing the descriptor 'chat' illustrate how speakers deploy it as a tactic to promote a description of an informal and blameless event, when in fact the episode in question might be categorised as something rather different. As befits an article by a member of Loughborough University's influential Discourse and Rhetoric Group, folded into the analysis is a persuasive demonstration of the methodological and theoretical strength of Conversation Analysis (CA) for describing language-in-use. However, as Antaki concludes, this is not just a game for analysts - we are all fundamentally sensitive to the power of the 'chat' descriptor. M/C 'chat' is introduced by Charles Antaki's Feature Article "Two Rhetorical Uses of the Description 'Chat'". In this insightful and highly accessible piece, Antaki explores the paradoxical manner in which the description of a discursive event as 'chat' may be used to socially persuasive ends. Antaki takes as his starting point the fact that some uses of the word 'chat' demonstrate an old-fashioned view of spoken discourse as an inefficient information-transmission system ('mere talk' and 'gossip'). This, he argues, belies -- and belittles -- its use in actual talk. Analyses of four transcripts containing the descriptor 'chat' illustrate how speakers deploy it as a tactic to promote a description of an informal and blameless event, when in fact the episode in question might be categorised as something rather different. As befits an article by a member of Loughborough University's influential Discourse and Rhetoric Group, folded into the analysis is a persuasive demonstration of the methodological and theoretical strength of Conversation Analysis (CA) for describing language-in-use. However, as Antaki concludes, this is not just a game for analysts - we are all fundamentally sensitive to the power of the 'chat' descriptor. In a turn away from the micro-level world of Conversation Analysis (CA), Mark Frankland's "Chatting in the Neighbourhood: Does It Have a Place in the World of Globalised Media?" is a broad diachronic and synchronic overview of the place local media such as 'chat' and community newspapers fit into an evolving and increasingly global media-scape. The first half of Frankland's article is an historical demonstration of the almost inevitable links between the rise of the urban form and moves away from local media to media globalisation. Given this history, in the second half of the article Frankland asks what effect the absence of local forms of media might have. He argues that local media forms are important sense-making mechanisms, operating at the level of personal effectivity, for assimilating the constantly changing media-scape. Local news media, and the even more micro level of 'chat' may act as "transition discourses", meaningful local contexts in which we may discuss the global. Most of the articles in this collection are about forms of chat to which both parties consent. "Invitation or Sexual Harassment? An Analysis of an Intercultural Communication Breakdown" by Zhu Yunxia and Peter Thompson considers quite the opposite -- unwelcome 'chatting up' or verbal sexual harassment. Zhu and Thompson examine a series of three telephone invitations to a party from a male Chinese tutor to a female Australian student, which resulted in an accusation of sexual harassment. Through an analysis combining Searle's speech acts, Austin's felicity conditions and Aristotle's rhetorical strategies, Zhu and Thompson suggest that different cultures use different tactics in the speech act of an invitation and they believe that the potential for miscommunication is increased when intercultural differences are present in the interaction. "The Naturally-Occurring Chat Machine" is Darren Reed and Malcolm Ashmore's interesting methodological reflection on the nature of the data collection and transcription processes of Conversation Analysis (CA), in order to "provoke a reconsideration of the marginal status of textually conducted interaction as a proper topic for CA". The worked-up complexities of CA transcripts, they argue, produce a myth of an unmediated origin, when in fact 'machinic-productive processes' are used to produce data considered 'studiable' in the CA of face-to-face conversations. Analogous processes produce data for the CA of Internet newsgroup messages. Ironically, in terms of CA's claim of using 'naturally occurring' data, Reed and Ashmore make the controversial counter-claim that newsgroup data might be considered superior to transcribed data, as the textual character of Internet newsgroups is the result of participants' work. In effect, therefore, Internet newsgroup data is considerably less mediated than recorded and transcribed conversations. Reed and Ashmore provide a neat link between bring the first section of M/C 'chat', dealing with what might be termed 'traditional chat media', and the second section concentrating on computer-mediated communication (CMC). The boom in CMC also marks the renaissance of Conversation Analytic research. Interestingly, both Reed and Ashmore, who end this section, and Paul ten Have, who we asked to introduce the CMC section, note that the proliferation of new interaction media not only provides new contexts in which to investigate human interaction, but also very conveniently produce easy-to-use data as a natural process of participation. Paul ten Have begins the CMC section with an introduction to some of the fundamental features and concerns of CMC research in his ethnographic investigation of how to find someone to talk to in a chat room. From the standpoint of Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), "Computer-Mediated Chat: Ways of Finding Chat Partners" takes us through a description of the more or less generic categorisation features of most chat rooms, and then into the three primary concerns that CMC users often make apparent very early in an interaction: age, sex and location, indicated by the acronymic "a/s/l please". Interestingly, his conclusion is that while it is clear that pre-existing communication procedures must be adapted to the new environment -- manifested perhaps most obviously by a more explicit questioning when searching for chat partners -- current media do not provide much scope for radical change in the fundamentals of 'chat'. Paul ten Have begins the CMC section with an introduction to some of the fundamental features and concerns of CMC research in his ethnographic investigation of how to find someone to talk to in a chat room. From the standpoint of Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), "Computer-Mediated Chat: Ways of Finding Chat Partners" takes us through a description of the more or less generic categorisation features of most chat rooms, and then into the three primary concerns that CMC users often make apparent very early in an interaction: age, sex and location, indicated by the acronymic "a/s/l please". Interestingly, his conclusion is that while it is clear that pre-existing communication procedures must be adapted to the new environment -- manifested perhaps most obviously by a more explicit questioning when searching for chat partners -- current media do not provide much scope for radical change in the fundamentals of 'chat'. Miranda Mowbray continues this theme of the false perception of restrictiveness. She notes that most interactive CMC systems place certain restrictions on the way in which a person may present themselves on arrival in the room. In her article, "Neither Male nor Female: Other -- Gendered Chat in Little Italy", Mowbray notes that the Little Italy's system (created by Pavel Curtis originally for Lambda MOO) gives participants the opportunity to broaden their gender presentation options from 'female' or 'male' to a range of 'other genders'. Mowbray observes that a fifth of the inhabitants of Little Italy opt to choose a gender other than that of the traditional 'female' or 'male', and, significantly, that half of users presenting as 'other genders' are still participating after a year -- more than the traditionally gendered Little Italians. Through 28 responses from these Little Italians, Mowbray investigates why these other-gendered participants are more likely to remain in the one space than those who chose 'female' or 'male'. She concludes that it is "the personal creative investment by the other-gendered citizens in Little Italy that makes them especially likely to remain active citizens." Mowbray considers Little Italy's system to be an excellent demonstration of a "stickiness" feature -- a feature of a CMC system that attracts long term use. Her results should be of interest to software companies wanting to design popular -- and profitable -- chat rooms. Since interactive synchronous and quasi-synchronous CMC systems became popular with the release of IRC, ICQ, Webchat and various ISP chat rooms, a flood of research about the transformation of language in computer-mediated situations has resulted. However most of this work has concentrated on chat between strangers. Campbell and Wickman observe this bias in their article, "Familiars in a Strange Land: A Case Study of Friends Chatting Online", choosing instead to concentrate on computer-mediated chat between acquaintances. In this autoethnographic account, the authors note that although they have adopted some of the more common conversational CMC strategies, they have also created their own, relevant to their particular circ*mstances. Historically, CMC research has argued that the 'cues-filtered-out' nature of CMC systems leads to depersonalisation and the lack of necessity to adhere to social conventions of politeness. However, Campbell and Wickman note that in their own chat as online and offline familiars, they observe a strong need to adhere to politeness conventions, due to the face-to-face consequences of their online actions. This interesting finding suggests that politeness theory may be of great value in future CMC research, particularly that comparing and contrasting chat between familiars and strangers, and/or face-to-face and online interaction. As Ylva Hård af Segerstad points out, most CMC research is conducted on English language forums. M/C 'chat' is pleased to help redress this balance with the publication of investigations on the impact of computer-mediation on languages other than English, in this case Swedish. Given the English focus of the Internet, however, CMC research on languages other than English must, of course, take account of the variations between the language-specific and 'international' (read English-language) forums. This being the case, Hård af Segerstad discusses the result of questionnaire data and logged conversations to determine if written online Swedish is being adapted in ways particular to it, or if Swedish written language is being developed in analogy with adaptations observable in international chat rooms. While the surprisingly uniform results of the two data sources indicate that Swedish written language is being adapted for online chat (rather than using one language offline and another online), the actual adaptation strategies are much the same as those observed in other adaptations of writing in general. In their paper "Chatting to Learn and Learning to Chat in Collaborative Virtual Environments", Teresa Cerratto and Yvonne Wærn discuss the importance of conversation to educational contexts and the communication problems inherent in using an electronic medium as an educational tool. These authors are more concerned with the information transmission aspect of chat rather than its dominant relationship characteristics. They examine two groups of teachers in Sweden who are learning to use the new collaborative virtual environment, TAPPED IN™. Cerratto and Wærn note some of the strategies that the teachers adopt in attempting to gain the floor in this CVE where there are a number of people vying for attention. At the same time, tactics used by teachers for communicative collaboration are also discussed by these authors. Finally, on the basis of an analysis of their data, Cerratto and Wærn provide arguments for the importance of leadership in these particular learning environments, arguing a leader helps maintain the informational coherence of the discussions. In terms of redressing imbalances in CMC research, not only has language been particularly biased to English, but in some media -- Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in particular -- most research has been qualitative in nature. We may know how users manage their interactions online, but how many are doing so? The bases of many generalisations about adaptation strategies are somewhat shaky on the quantitative front. Much can be gained by combining the quantitative with the qualitative, and with this in mind, Hinner has taken it upon himself to not only create a system capable of capturing usage statistics for all the major IRC networks, but also to provide two years of these statistics and make this system available on his Website. His article details the processes involved in creating the Socip statistical program and sample graphs of the kinds of information that his system can provide. The CMC section of M/C 'Chat' brought to our attention many more articles than we could publish in the already quite expanded issue, and we were sorry to have had to pass over promising work in this popular field. The contributions included, however, represent a turning point in CMC research, in which our wonder -- and glee -- of describing findings of social interaction in what were assumed to be anti-social media, has turned to the detailed consideration of just how socialisation is accomplished in what promise to be increasingly common media. What has not changed, as Paul ten Have notes, and, indeed, as Charles Antaki began the issue, is that all human life can be found in language-in-use -- wherever it takes place. Hinner's article brings the CMC section of M/C 'chat' to a close, but is not quite the last blast. Very early in the article submission process, Ulf Wilhelmsson contacted us about including his "Dialogue on Film and Philosophy". Wilhelmsson wanted to translate -- from the original Swedish -- his Socratic dialogue about film in which Quentin Tarantino moderates a discussion involving numerous influential philosophers, film-makers, film-scholars and the odd Beatle (John Lennon). While we were somewhat taken aback, the rough translation of the first few lines was interesting, and, as it turns out, quite entertaining. Unfortunately, due to its length, the dialogue can not be supplied in regular M/C 'bits', and so we have made it available as a downloadable Rich Text Format file. See the Editor's Preface to Wilhelmsson's article for more information on its content and to download the file itself. This very global issue of M/C brings together people in Germany to New Zealand, Sweden to the UK, all chatting about chat. We hope you enjoy this collection of articles. Felicity Meakins & E. Sean Rintel -- 'Chat' Issue Editors References Laver, John. "Communicative Functions of Phatic Communication." The Organisation of Behaviour in Face-to-Face Interaction. Eds. Adam Kendon, Richard M. Harris, and Mary Ritchie Key. The Hague: Mouton, 1975. 215-38. ---. "Linguistic Routines and Politeness in Greeting and Parting." Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardised Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech. Ed. Florian Coulmas. The Hague: Mouton, 1981. 289-304. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Supplement. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and the Science of Symbolism. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trebner, 1923. 451-510. Rpt. as "Phatic Communion." Communication in Face-to-Face Interaction. Ed. John Laver and Sandy Hutchinson. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972. 126-52. Trollope, Antony. Framley Parsonage. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Helmick Beavin, and Don D. Jackson. Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. New York: Norton, 1967. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Felicity Meakins, E. Sean Rintel. "Editorial: 'Chat'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/edit.php>. Chicago style: Felicity Meakins, E. Sean Rintel, "Editorial: 'Chat'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Felicity Meakins, E. Sean Rintel. (2000) Editorial: 'chat'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

This variable describes the basic journalistic genres typically used in specialized cultural coverage. The fundamental distinction goes between fact-based objective-seeking genres, such as news and news feature, and opinionated articles based on subjective accounts, such as columns, essays, comments and reviews. In journalism, it is important to separate opinions from facts, and this is why subjective views are differentiated from ways of representation that are based on the strategic ritual of objectivity (Tuchman, 1972), i.e., presenting facts by referring to sources or simply describing them instead of exposing the journalists’ own opinions and feelings. Reviews present a specialist genre of their own, connected to the institution of criticism (Hohendahl, 1982). Reviewing – the evaluation of new cultural products on the market – underlies the assumption that only selected experts are allowed to write reviews (Chong, 2020). Newspapers are also constantly developing their means of presentation, which results in an increased number of different newspaper-specific and hybrid formats, both in print and online (see, e.g., Santos Silva, 2019). Being not only medium-specific, genres may also vary from one journalistic culture to another, which makes a nuanced cross-cultural comparison difficult and motivates a limited use of values. Field of application/theoretical foundation Journalistic genres constitute the epistemological ground on which cultural journalists and reviewers cover culture. Scholars have been interested in the shifts in cultural coverage that have occurred between descriptive, interpretative, and evaluative content (Widholm et al., 2019). Descriptive content is often regarded in professional terms as non-ambitious in culture, while the meaning-making subjective elements are preferred and conceived of as an indication of quality (proactive professional engagement rather than marketing of cultural events). In cultural coverage, it is yet often difficult to separate facts from evaluative accounts, as the description of products, phenomena, persons, and events often require that they are put into an evaluative frame. The selection of a genre is related to the production structures, as many reviews are written by freelancers outside the newsroom. The number and share of reviews are typically regarded as an indication of journalistic acknowledgement for expert knowledge, and also the volume of outsourced production, as a great majority of reviews are written by freelancer-based experts. A decreasing number of reviews is thus typically interpreted as a crisis of criticism (Elkins, 2003; Jaakkola, 2015). References/combination with other methods of data collection Journalistic genres are often studied in conjunction to the artistic genres (see variable “Forms of culture”). Some studies are only interested in tracing the number and volume of reviews. Sample operationalization The two basic journalistic genres are news and reviews. News coverage can be further broken down to news feature (phenomenon-led coverage also called reportage) and person-led feature (typically referred to as person portraits). Further, there are two typical opinionated genres, essays and columns, and many kinship genres such as analysis, (news) comment and preview, that can be separately identified or merged into one variable showing personal voicing of the author. Example study Jaakkola (2015) Information about Jaakkola, 2015 Author: Maarit Jaakkola Research question/research interest: Representation of the share of journalistic genres applied in covering culture on culture pages of daily newspapers across time, to expose the production structure Object of analysis: Articles/text items on culture pages of five major daily newspapers in Finland 1978–2008 (Aamulehti, Helsingin Sanomat, Kaleva, Savon Sanomat, Turun Sanomat) Timeframe of analysis: 1978–2008, consecutive sample of weeks 7 and 42 in five year intervals (1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008) Info about variable Variable name/definition: Journalistic genre Unit of analysis: Article/text item Values: Journalistic genre Description 1. News Informative, fact-based article intended to deliver an objective account on an event 2. Review Opinionated, subjective article related to a new cultural product with an intention to evaluate it, written by a reviewer or critic 3. Person portrait/feature An informative article, typically interview-based, in which a person constitutes the topic 4. Reportage/feature An informative article intended to give account of the context of a news event or examine a phenomenon 5. Essay A longer opinionated, subjective article written by a journalist or reviewer to cover a phenomenon, process, state of the art or arts, etc. 6. Other commentary A short opinionated, subjective article written by a journalist (non-reviewer): a column, causerie, comment, preview or analysis, sometimes related to a news article 7. Other A text item not suited for any other category; e.g., a list, visualization, hybrid format, or similar Scale: nominal Intercoder reliability: Cohen's kappa > 0.76 (two coders) References Chong, P.K. (2020). Inside the critics‘ circle: Book reviewing in uncertain times. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Elkins, J. (2003). What happened to art criticism? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Bristol University Presses. Hohendahl, P.U. (1982). Institution of criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jaakkola, M. (2015). Witnesses of a cultural crisis: Representations of mediatic metaprocesses as professional metacriticism of arts journalism. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(5), 537–554. doi:10.1177/1367877913519308 Santos Silva, D. (2019). Digitally empowered: New patterns of sourcing and expertise in cultural journalism and criticism. Journalism Practice, 13(5), 592–601. doi: 10.1080/17512786.2018.1507682 Tuchman, G. (1972). Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen's notions of objectivity. American Journal of Sociology, 77(4), 660–679. doi:10.1086/225193 Widholm, A., Riegert, K., & Roosvall, A. (2019). Abundance or crisis? Transformations in the media ecology of Swedish cultural journalism over four decades. Journalism. Advance online publication August, 6. Journalism. doi:10.1177/1464884919866077

Abstract:

Introduction -- Making Sense of the (Virtual) World Computer games are never "just games". Computer games are models of reality and if they were not, we would never be able to understand them. Models serve three functions; they capture important, critical features of that which is to be represented while ignoring the irrelevant, they are appropriate for the person and they are appropriate for the task -- thereby enhancing the ability to make judgements and discover relevant regularities and structures (Norman 1993). Despite the inherently unvisualisable nature of computer code -- the flexible material of which all software constructs are built -- computer code is still the most "salient" ingredient in computer games. Less salient are those assumptions that are "built into" the software. By filtering out those parts of reality that are deemed irrelevant or unnecessary, different sorts of assumptions, different sorts of bias are automatically built into the software, reified in the very computer code (Friedman 1995, Friedman and Nissenbaum 1997). Here I will analyse some of the built-in structures that constitute the fabric of a special sort of game, a MUD. A MUD is an Internet-accessible "multi-participant, user-extensible virtual reality whose user interface is entirely textual" (Curtis, 1992). The specific MUD in question is a nine-year old Swedish-language adventure MUD called SvenskMUD ("SwedishMUD") that is run by Lysator, the academic computer club at Linköping University, Sweden. I have done field studies of SvenskMUD over a period of three and a half years (Pargman, forthcoming 2000). How is the SvenskMUD adventure world structured and what are the rules that are built into the fabric of this computer game? I will describe some of the ways in which danger and death, good and evil, courage, rewards and wealth are handled in the game. I will conclude the paper with a short analysis of the purpose of configuring the player according to those structures. Revocable Deaths Characters (personae/avatars) in SvenskMUD can be divided into two categories, players and magicians. Making a career as a player to a large part involves solving quests and killing "monsters" in the game. The magicians are all ex-players who have "graduated" and gone beyond playing the game of SvenskMUD. They have become the administrators, managers and programmers of SvenskMUD. A watchful eye is kept on the magicians by "God", the creator, owner and ultimate custodian of SvenskMUD. My own first battle in the game, in a sunlit graveyard with a small mouse, is an example of a bit-sized danger suitable for newcomers, or "newbies". I correctly guessed that the mouse was a suitably weak opponent for my newborn character, but still had to "tickle" the mouse on its belly (a euphemism for hitting it without much force) 50 times before I managed to kill it. Other parts of this epic battle included 45 failed attempts of mine to "tickle" the mouse, 39 successful "tickles" of the mouse and finally a wild chase around the graveyard before I caught up with the mouse, cornered it and managed to kill it and end the fight. Although I was successful in my endeavour, I was also more than half dead after my run-in with the mouse and had to spend quite some time engaged in more peaceful occupations before I was completely healed. It was only later that I learned that you can improve your odds considerably by using weapons and armour when you fight... Should a SvenskMUD player fail in his (or less often, her) risky and adventurous career and die, that does not constitute an insurmountable problem. Should such a thing pass, the player's ghost only has to find the way back to a church in one of the villages. In the church, the player is reincarnated, albeit with some loss of game-related abilities and experience. The way the unfortunate event of an occasional death is handled is part of the meta-rules of SvenskMUD. The meta-rules are the implicit, underlying rules that represent the values, practices and concerns that shape the frame from which the "ordinary" specific rules operate. Meta-rules are part of the "world view that directs the game action and represents the implicit philosophy or ideals by which the world operates" (Fine 1983, 76). Despite the adventure setting with all its hints of medieval lawlessness and unknown dangers lurking, SvenskMUD is in fact a very caring and forgiving environment. The ultimate proof of SvenskMUD's forgiveness is the revocable character of death itself. Fair Dangers Another SvenskMUD meta-rule is that dangers (and death) should be "fair". This fairness is extended so as to warn players explicitly of dangers. Before a dangerous monster is encountered, the player receives plenty of warnings: You are standing in the dark woods. You feel a little afraid. East of you is a small dark lake in the woods. There are three visible ways from here: east, north and south. It would be foolish to direct my character to go east in this situation without being adequately prepared for encountering and taking on something dangerous in battle. Those preparations should include a readiness to flee if the expected danger proves to be superior. If, in the example above, a player willingly and knowingly directs a character to walk east, that player has to face the consequences of this action. But if another player is very cautious and has no reason to suspect a deadly danger lurking behind the corner, it is not considered "fair" if that player's character dies or is hurt in such a way that it results in damage that has far-reaching consequences within the game. The dangerous monsters that roam the SvenskMUD world are restricted to roam only "dangerous" areas and it is considered good manners to warn players in some way when they enter such an area. Part of learning how to play SvenskMUD successfully becomes a matter of understanding different cues, such as the transition from a safe area to a dangerous one, or the different levels of danger signalled by different situations. Should they not know it in advance, players quickly learn that it is not advisable to enter the "Valley of Ultimate Evil" unless they have reached a very high level in the game and are prepared to take on any dangers that come their way. As with all other meta-rules, both players and magicians internalise this rule to such an extent that it becomes unquestionable and any transgression (such as a dangerous monster roaming around in a village, killing newbie characters who happen to stray its way) would immediately render complaints from players and corresponding actions on behalf of the magicians to rectify the situation. Meta-Rules as "Folk Ideas" Fine (1983, 76-8) enumerates four meta-rules that Dundes (1971) has described and applies them to the fantasy role-playing games he has studied. Dundes's term for these meta-rules is "folk ideas" and they reflect existing North American (and Western European) cultural beliefs. Fine shows that these folk ideas capture core beliefs or central values of the fantasy role-playing games he studied. Three of Dundes's four folk ideas are also directly applicable to SvenskMUD. Unlimited Wealth The first folk idea is the principle of unlimited good. There is no end to growth or wealth. For that reason, treasure found in a dungeon doesn't need a rationale for being there. This folk idea is related to the modernist concept of constant, unlimited progress. "Some referees even 'restock' their dungeons when players have found a particular treasure so that the next time someone enters that room (and kills the dragon or other beasties guarding it) they, too, will be rewarded" (Fine 1983, 76). To restock all treasures and reawaken all killed monsters at regular intervals is standard procedure in SvenskMUD and all other adventure MUDs. The technical term is that the game "resets". The reason why a MUD resets at regular intervals is that, while the MUD itself is finite, there is no end to the number of players who want their share of treasures and other goodies. The handbook for SvenskMUD magicians contains "design guidelines" for creating quests: You have to invent a small story about your quest. The typical scenario is that someone needs help with something. It is good if you can get the story together in such a way that it is possible to explain why it can be solved several times, since the quest will be solved, once for each prospective magician. Perhaps a small spectacle a short while after (while the player is pondering the reward) that in some way restore things in such a way that it can be solved again. (Tolke 1993, my translation) Good and Evil The second folk idea is that the world is a battleground between good and evil. In fantasy literature or a role-playing game there is often no in-between and very seldom any doubt whether someone encountered is good or evil, as "referees often express the alignment [moral character] of nonplayer characters through stereotyped facial features or symbolic colours" (Fine 1983, 77). "Good and evil" certainly exists as a structuring resource for the SvenskMUD world, but interestingly the players are not able to be described discretely in these terms. As distinct from role-playing games, a SvenskMUD player is not created with different alignments (good, evil or neutral). All players are instead neutral and they acquire an alignment as they go along, playing SvenskMUD -- the game. If a player kills a lot of mice and cute rabbits, that player will turn first wicked and then evil. If a player instead kills trolls and orcs, that player first turns good and then saint-like. Despite the potential fluidity of alignment in SvenskMUD, some players cultivate an aura of being good or evil and position themselves in opposition to each other. This is most apparent with two of the guilds (associations) in SvenskMUD, the Necromancer's guild and the Light order's guild. Courage Begets Rewards The third folk idea is the importance of courage. Dangers and death operate in a "fair" way, as should treasures and rewards. The SvenskMUD world is structured both so as not to harm or kill players "needlessly", and in such a way that it conveys the message "no guts, no glory" to the players. In different places in the MUD (usually close to a church, where new players start), there are "easy" areas with bit-sized dangers and rewards for beginners. My battle with the mouse was an example of such a danger/reward. A small coin or an empty bottle that can be returned for a small finder's fee are examples of other bit-sized rewards: The third folk idea is the importance of courage. Dangers and death operate in a "fair" way, as should treasures and rewards. The SvenskMUD world is structured both so as not to harm or kill players "needlessly", and in such a way that it conveys the message "no guts, no glory" to the players. In different places in the MUD (usually close to a church, where new players start), there are "easy" areas with bit-sized dangers and rewards for beginners. My battle with the mouse was an example of such a danger/reward. A small coin or an empty bottle that can be returned for a small finder's fee are examples of other bit-sized rewards: More experienced characters gain experience points (xps) and rise in levels only by seeking out and overcoming danger and "there is a positive correlation between the danger in a setting and its payoff in treasure" (Fine 1983, 78). Just as it would be "unfair" to die without adequate warning, so would it be (perceived to be) grossly unfair to seek out and overcome dangerous monsters or situations without being adequately rewarded. And conversely, it would be perceived to be unfair if someone "stumbled over the treasure" without having deserved it, i.e. if someone was rewarded without having performed an appropriately difficult task. Taken from the information on etiquette in an adventure MUD, Reid's quote is a good example of this: It's really bad form to steal someone else's kill. Someone has been working on the Cosmicly Invulnerable Utterly Unstoppable Massively Powerful Space Demon for ages, leaves to get healed, and in the interim, some dweeb comes along and whacks the Demon and gets all it's [sic] stuff and tons of xps [experience points]. This really sucks as the other person has spent lots of time and money in expectation of the benefits from killing the monster. The graceful thing to do is to give em [sic] all the stuff from the corpse and compensation for the money spent on healing. This is still a profit to you as you got all the xps and spent practically no time killing it. (Reid 1999, 122, my emphasis) The User Illusion An important objective of the magicians in SvenskMUD is to describe everything that a player experiences in the SvenskMUD world in game-related terms. The game is regarded as a stage where the players are supposed to see only what is in front of, but not behind the scenes. A consistent use of game-related terms and game-related explanations support the suspension of disbelief and engrossment in the SvenskMUD fantasy world. The main activity of the MUD users should be to enter into the game and guide their characters through a fascinating (and, as much as possible and on its own terms, believable) fantasy world. The guiding principle is therefore that the player should never be reminded of the fact that the SvenskMUD world is not for real, that SvenskMUD is only a game or a computer program. From this perspective, the worst thing players can encounter in SvenskMUD is a breakdown of the user illusion, a situation that instantly transports a person from the SvenskMUD world and leaves that person sitting in front of a computer screen. Error messages, e.g. the feared "you have encountered a bug [in the program]", are an example of this. If a magician decides to change the SvenskMUD world, that magician is supposed to do the very best to explain the change by using game-related jargon. This is reminiscent of the advice to "work within the system": "wherever possible, things that can be done within the framework of the experiential level should be. The result will be smoother operation and greater harmony among the user community" (Morningstar and Farmer 1991, 294). If for some reason a shop has to be moved from one village to another, a satisfactory explanation must be given, e.g. a fire occurring in the old shop or the old shop being closed due to competition (perhaps from the "new", relocated shop). Explanations that involve supernatural forces or magic are also fine in a fantasy world. Explanations that remind the player of the fact that the SvenskMUD world is not for real ("I moved the shop to Eriksros, because all magicians decided that it would be so much better to have it there"), or even worse, that SvenskMUD is a computer program ("I moved the program shop.c to another catalogue in the file structure") are to be avoided at all costs. Part of socialising magicians becomes teaching them to express themselves in this way even when they know better about the machinations of SvenskMud. There are several examples of ingenious and imaginative ways to render difficult-to-explain phenomena understandable in game-related terms: There was a simple problem that appeared at times that made the computer [that SvenskMUD runs on] run a little slower, and as time went by the problem got worse. I could fix the problem easily when I saw it and I did that at times. After I had fixed the problem the game went noticeably faster for the players that were logged in. For those occasions, I made up a message and displayed it to everyone who was in the system: "Linus reaches into the nether regions and cranks a little faster". (Interview with Linus Tolke, "God" in SvenskMUD) When a monster is killed in the game, it rots away (disappears) after a while. However, originally, weapons and armour that the monster wielded did not disappear; a lucky player could find valuable objects and take them without having "deserved" them. This specific characteristic of the game was deemed to be a problem, not least because it furthered a virtual inflation in the game that tended to decrease the value of "honestly" collected weapons and loot. The problem was discussed at a meeting of the SvenskMUD magicians that I attended. It was decided that when a monster is killed and the character that killed it does not take the loot, the loot should disappear ("rot") together with the monster. But how should this be explained to the players in a suitable way if they approach a magician to complain about the change, a change that in their opinion was for the worse? At the meeting it was suggested that from now on, all weapons and shields were forged with a cheaper, weaker metal. Not only would objects of this metal "rot" away together with the monster that wielded them, but it was also suggested that all weapons in the whole game should in fact be worn down as time goes by. (Not to worry, new ones appear in all the pre-designated places every time the game resets.) Conclusion -- Configuring the Player SvenskMUD can easily be perceived as a "blooming buzzing confusion" for a new player and my own first explorations in SvenskMUD often left me confused even as I was led from one enlightenment to the next. Not everyone feels inclined to take up the challenge to make sense of a world where you have to learn everything anew, including how to walk and how to talk. On the other hand, in the game world, much is settled for the best, and a crack in a subterranean cave is always exactly big enough to squeeze through... The process of becoming part of the community of SvenskMUD players is inexorably connected to learning to become an expert in the activities of that community, i.e. of playing SvenskMUD (Wenger 1998). A player who wants to program in SvenskMUD (thereby altering the fabric of the virtual world) will acquire many of the relevant concepts before actually becoming a magician, just by playing and exploring the game of SvenskMUD. Even if the user illusion succeeds in always hiding the computer code from the player, the whole SvenskMUD world constitutes a reflection of that underlying computer code. An implicit understanding of the computer code is developed through extended use of SvenskMUD. The relationship between the SvenskMUD world and the underlying computer code is in this sense analogous to the relationship between the lived-in world and the rules of physics that govern the world. All around us children "prepare themselves" to learn the subject of physics in school by throwing balls up in the air (gravity) and by pulling carts or sledges (friction). By playing SvenskMUD, a player will become accustomed to many of the concepts that govern the SvenskMUD world and will come to understand the goals, symbols, procedures and values of SvenskMUD. This process bears many similarities to the "primary socialisation" of a child into a member of society, a socialisation that serves "to make appear as necessity what is in fact a bundle of contingencies" (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 155). This is the purpose of configuring the player and it is intimately connected to the re-growth of SvenskMUD magicians and the survival of SvenskMUD itself over time. However, it is not the only possible outcome of the SvenskMUD socialisation process. The traditional function of trials and quests in fantasy literature is to teach the hero, usually through a number of external or internal encounters with evil or doubt, to make the right, moral choices. By excelling at these tests, the protagonist shows his or her worthiness and by extension also stresses and perhaps imputes these values in the reader (Dalquist et al. 1991). Adventure MUDs could thus socialise adolescents and reinforce common moral values in society; "the fantasy hero is the perfectly socialised and exemplary subject of a society" (53, my translation). My point here is not that SvenskMUD differs from other adventure MUDs. I would imagine that most of my observations are general to adventure MUDs and that many are applicable also to other computer games. My purpose here has rather been to present a perspective on how an adventure MUD is structured, to trace the meaning of that structure beyond the game itself and to suggest a purpose behind that organisation. I encourage others to question built-in bias and underlying assumptions of computer games (and other systems) in future studies. References Berger, P., and T. Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin, 1966. Curtis, P. "MUDding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities." High Noon on the Electronic Frontier. Ed. P. Ludlow. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996. 13 Oct. 2000 <http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/virtual-reality/communications/papers/muds/muds/Mudding-Social-Phenomena.txt>. Dalquist, U., T. Lööv, and F. Miegel. "Trollkarlens lärlingar: Fantasykulturen och manlig identitetsutveckling [The Wizard's Apprentices: Fantasy Culture and Male Identity Development]." Att förstå ungdom [Understanding Youth]. Ed. A. Löfgren and M. Norell. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 1991. Dundes, A. "Folk Ideas as Units of World View." Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Ed. A. Paredes and R. Bauman. Austin: U of Texas P, 1971. Fine, G.A. Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Friedman, B. and H. Nissenbaum. "Bias in Computer Systems." Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology. Ed. B. Friedman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997. Friedman, T. "Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality." Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. Morningstar, C. and F. R. Farmer. "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat." Cyberspace: The First Steps. Ed. M. Benedikt. Cambridge: MA, MIT P, 1991. 13 Oct. 2000 <http://www.communities.com/company/papers/lessons.php>. Norman, D. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993. Pargman, D. "Code Begets Community: On Social and Technical Aspects of Managing a Virtual Community." Ph.D. dissertation. Dept. of Communication Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, forthcoming, December 2000. Reid, E. "Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace." Communities in Cyberspace. Ed. M. Smith and P. Kollock. London, England: Routledge, 1999. Tolke, L. Handbok för SvenskMudmagiker: ett hjälpmedel för byggarna i SvenskMUD [Handbook for SvenskMudmagicians: An Aid for the Builders in SvenskMUD]. Printed and distributed by the author in a limited edition, 1993. Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel Pargman. "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/mud.php>. Chicago style: Daniel Pargman, "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/mud.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel Pargman. (2000) The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/mud.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Music from Another Time – One Perth Night in 2009The following extract is taken from fieldwork notes from research into the enduring Northern Soul dance scene in Perth, Western Australia.It’s 9.30 and I’m walking towards the Hyde Park Hotel on a warm May night. I stop to talk to Jenny, from London, who tells me about her 1970s trip to India and teenage visits to soul clubs in Soho. I enter a cavernous low-ceilinged hall, which used to be a jazz venue and will be a Dan Murphy’s bottle shop before the year ends. South West Soul organiser Tommy, wearing 34-inch baggy trousers, gives me a Northern Soul handshake, involving upturned thumbs. ‘Spread the Faith’, he says. Drinkers are lined up along the long bar to the right and I grab a glass of iced water. A few dancers are out on the wooden floor and a mirror ball rotates overhead. Pat Fisher, the main Perth scene organiser, is away working in Monaco, but the usual suspects are there: Carlisle Derek, Ivan from Cheltenham, Ron and Gracie from Derby. Danny is back from DJing in Tuscany, after a few days in Widnes with old friends. We chat briefly mouth to ear, as the swirling strings and echo-drenched vocals of the Seven Souls’ 45 record, ‘I still love you’ boom through the sound system. The drinkers at the bar hit the floor for Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move on up’ and the crowd swells to about 80. When I move onto the floor, Barbara Acklin’s ‘Am I the Same Girl?’ plays, prompting reflection on being the same, older person dancing to a record from my teenage years. On the bridge of the piano and conga driven ‘’Cause you’re mine’, by the Vibrations, everybody claps in unison, some above their heads, some behind their backs, some with an expansive, open-armed gesture. The sound is like the crack of pistol. We are all living in the moment, lost in the music, moving forward and backward, gliding sideways, and some of us spinning, dervish-like, for a few seconds, if we can still maintain our balance.Having relocated their scene from England south to the Antipodes, most of the participants described on this night are now in their sixties. Part of the original scene myself, I was a participant observer, dancing and interviewing, and documenting and exploring scene practices over five years.The local Perth scene, which started in 1996, is still going strong, part of a wider Australian and New Zealand scene. The global scene goes back nearly 50 years to the late 1960s. Northern Soul has now also become southern. It has also become significantly present in the USA, its place of inspiration, and in such disparate places as Medellin, in Colombia, and Kobe, in Japan.The feeling of ‘living in the moment’ described is a common feature of dance-oriented subcultures. It enables escape from routines, stretches the present opportunity for leisure and postpones the return to other responsibilities. The music and familiar dance steps of a long-standing scene like Northern Soul also stimulate a nostalgic reverie, in which you can persuade yourself you are 18 again.Dance steps are forward, backward and sideways and on crowded dancefloors self-expression is necessarily attenuated. These movements are repeated and varied as each bar returns to the first beat and in subcultures like Northern Soul are sufficiently stylised as to show solidarity. This solidarity is enhanced by a unison handclap, triggered by cues in some records. Northern Soul is not line-dancing. Dancers develop their own moves.Place of Origin: Soul from the North?For those new to Northern Soul, the northern connection may seem a little puzzling. The North of England is often still imagined as a cold, rainy wasteland of desolate moors and smoky, industrial, mostly working-class cities, but such stereotyping obscures real understanding. Social histories have also tended to focus on such phenomena as the early twentieth century Salford gang members, the “Northern Scuttlers”, with “bell-bottomed trousers … and the thick iron-shod clogs” (Roberts 123).The 1977 Granada television documentary about the key Northern Soul club, Wigan Casino, This England, captured rare footage; but this was framed by hackneyed backdrops of mills and collieries. Yet, some elements of the northern stereotype are grounded in reality.Engels’s portrayal of the horrors of early nineteenth century Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was an influential exploration of the birth pains of this first industrial city, and many northern towns and cities have experienced similar traumas. Levels of social disadvantage in contemporary Britain, whilst palpable everywhere, are still particularly significant in the North, as researched by Buchan, Kontopantelis, Sperrin, Chandola and Doran in North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study.By the end of the 1960s, the relative affluence of Harold Wilson’s England began to recede and there was increased political and counter-cultural activity. Into this social climate emerged both skinheads, as described by Fowler in Skins Rule and the Northern Soul scene.Northern Soul scene essentially developed as an extension of the 1960s ‘mod’ lifestyle, built around soul music and fashion. A mostly working-class response to urban life and routine, it also evidenced the ability of the more socially mobile young to get out and stay up late.Although more London mods moved into psychedelia and underground music, many soul fans sought out obscure, but still prototypical Motown-like records, often from the northern American cities Detroit and Chicago. In Manchester, surplus American records were transported up the Ship Canal to Trafford Park, the port zone (Ritson and Russell 1) and became cult club hits, as described in Rylatt and Scott’s Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel.In the early 1970s, the rare soul fans found a name for their scene. “The Dave Godin Column” in the fanzine Blues and Soul, published in London, referred for the first time to ‘Northern Soul’ in 1971, really defining ‘Northern’ directionally, as a relative location anywhere ‘north of Watford’, not a specific place.The scene gradually developed specific sites, clothes, dances and cultural practices, and was also popular in southern England, and actually less visible in cities such as Liverpool and Newcastle. As Nowell (199) argues, the idea that Northern Soul was regionally based is unfounded, a wider movement emerging as a result of the increased mobility made possible by railways and motorways (Ritson and Russell 14).Clubs like the Blackpool Mecca and Wigan Casino were very close to motorway slip roads and accessible to visitors from further south. The initial scene was not self-consciously northern and many early clubs, like the ‘Golden Torch’, in Tunstall were based in the Midlands, as recounted by Wall (441).The Time and Space of the DancefloorThe Northern Soul scene’s growth was initially covered in fanzines like Blues and Soul, and then by Frith and Cummings (23-32). Following Cosgrove (38-41) and Chambers (142), a number of insider accounts (Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell; Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul by Nowell; The In-Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene by Ritson & Russell) were followed by academic studies (Milestone 134-149; Hollows and Milestone 83-103; Wall 431-445). The scene was first explored by an American academic in Browne’s Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene.Many clubs in earlier days were alcohol-free, though many club-goers substituted amphetamines (Wilson 1-5) as a result, but across the modern scene, drug-taking is not significant. On Northern Soul nights, dancing is the main activity and drinking is incidental. However, dance has received less subtle attention than it deserves as a key nexus between the culture of the scene and black America.Pruter (187) referred to the earlier, pre-disco “myopia” of many music writers on the subject of dance, though its connection to leisure, pleasure, the body and “serious self-realization” (Chambers 7) has been noted. Clearly Northern Soul dancers find “evasive” pleasure (Fiske 127) and “jouissance” (Barthes v) in the merging of self into record.Wall (440) has been more nuanced in his perceptions of the particular “physical geography” of the Northern Soul dance floor, seeing it as both responsive to the music, and a vehicle for navigating social and individual space. Dancers respond to each other, give others room to move and are also connected to those who stand and watch. Although friends often dance close, they are careful not to exclude others and dancing between couples is rare. At the end of popular records, there is often applause. Some dance all night, with a few breaks; others ‘pace’ themselves (Mercieca et al. 78).The gymnastics of Northern Soul have attracted attention, but the forward dives, back drops and spins are now less common. Two less noticed markers of the Northern Soul dancing style, the glide and the soul clap, were highlighted by Wall (432). Cosgrove (38) also noted the sideways glide characteristic of long-time insiders and particularly well deployed by female dancers.Significantly, friction-reducing talcum powder is almost sacramentally sprinkled on the floor, assisting dancers to glide more effectively. This fluid feature of the dancing makes the scene more attractive to those whose forms of expression are less overtly masculine.Sprung wooden floors are preferred and drink on the floor is frowned upon, as spillage compromises gliding. The soul clap is a communal clap, usually executed at key points in a record. Sometimes very loud, this perfectly timed unison clap is a remarkable, though mostly unselfconscious, display of group co-ordination, solidarity and resonance.Billy from Manchester, one of the Perth regulars, and notable for his downward clapping motion, explained simply that the claps go “where the breaks are” (Mercieca et al. 71). The Northern Soul clap demonstrates key attributes of what Wunderlich (384) described as “place-temporality in urban space”, emerging from the flow of music and movement in a heightened form of synchronisation and marked by the “vivid sense of time” (385) produced by emotional and social involvement.Crucially, as Morris noted, A Sense of Space is needed to have a sense of time and dancers may spin and return via the beat of the music to the same spot. For Northern Soul dancers, the movements forwards, backwards, sideways through objective, “geometric space” are paralleled by a traversing of existential, “conceived space”. The steps in microcosm symbolise the relentless wider movements we make through life. For Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, these “trialectics” create “lived space”.A Sense of Place and Evolving IdentitySpaces are plastic environments, charged with emerging meanings. For Augé, they can also remain spaces or be manipulated into “Non-Places”. When the sense of space is heightened there is the potential for lived spaces to become places. The space/place distinction is a matter of contention, but, broadly, space is universal and non-relational, and place is particular and relational.For Augé, a space can be social, but if it lacks implicit, shared cultural understandings and requires explicit signs and rules, as with an airport or supermarket, it is a non-place. It is not relational. It lacks history. Time cannot be stretched or temporarily suspended. As non-places proliferate, urban people spend more time alone in crowds, ”always, and never, at home” (109), though this anonymity can still provide the possibility of changing identity and widening experience.Northern Soul as a culture in the abstract, is a space, but one with distinct practices which tend towards the creation of places and identities. Perth’s Hyde Park Hotel is a place with a function space at the back. This empty hall, on the night described in the opening, temporarily became a Northern Soul Club. The dance floor was empty as the night began, but gradually became not just a space, but a place. To step onto a mostly empty dance floor early in the night, is to cross liminal space, and to take a risk that you will be conspicuous or lonely for a while, or both.This negotiation of space is what Northern Soul, like many other club cultures has always offered, the promise and risk of excitement outside the home. Even when the floor is busy, it is still possible to feel alone in a crowd, but at some stage in the night, there is also the possibility, via some moment of resonance, that a feeling of connection with others will develop. This is a familiar teenage theme, a need to escape bonds and make new ones, to be both mobile and stable. Northern Soul is one of the many third spaces/places (Soja 137) which can create opportunities to navigate time, space and place, and to find a new sense of direction and identity. Nicky from Cornwall, who arrived in Perth in the early 1970s, felt like “a fish out of water”, until involvement in the Northern Soul scene helped him to achieve a successful migration (Mercieca et al. 34-38). Figure 1: A Perth Northern Soul night in 2007. Note the talcum powder on the DJ table, for sprinkling on the dancefloor. The record playing is ‘Helpless’, by Kim Weston.McRobbie has argued in Dance and Social Fantasy that Northern Soul provides places for women to define and express themselves, and it has appealed to more to female and LGBTQIA participants than the more masculine dominated rock, funk and hip-hop scenes. The shared appreciation of records and the possibilities for expression and sociality in dance unite participants and blur gender lines.While the more athletic dancers have tended to be male, dancing is essentially non-contact, as in many other post-1960s ‘discotheque’ styles, yet there is little overt sexual display or flirtation involved. Male and female styles, based on foot rather than arm movements, are similar, almost ungendered, and the Soul scene has differed from more mainstream nightlife cultures focussed on finding partners, as noted in Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell. Whilst males, who are also involved in record buying, predominated in the early scene, women now often dominate the dance floor (Wall 441).The Perth scene is little different, yet the changed gender balance has not produced more partner-seeking for either the older participants, who are mostly in long-term relationships and the newer, younger members, who enjoy the relative gender-blindness, and focus on communality and cultural affinity. Figure 2: A younger scene member, ‘Nash’, DJing in Perth in 2016. He has since headed north to Denmark and is now part of the Nordic Northern Soul scene.In Perth, for Stan from Derby, Northern Soul linked the experiences of “poor white working class kids” with young black Americans (Mercieca et al. 97). Hollows and Milestone (87-94) mapped a cultural geographic relationship between Northern Soul and the Northern cities of the USA where the music originated. However, Wall (442) suggested that Northern Soul is drawn from the more bi-racial soul of the mid-1960s than the funky, Afro-centric 1970s and essentially deploys the content of the music to create an alternative British identity, rather than to align more closely with the American movement for self-determination. Essentially, Northern Soul shows how “the meanings of one culture can be transformed in the cultural practices of another time and place” (Wall 444).Many contemporary Australian youth cultures are more socially and ethnically mixed than the Northern Soul scene. However, over the years, the greater participation of women, and of younger and newer members, has made its practices less exclusive, and the notion of an “in-crowd” more relaxed (Wall 439). The ‘Northern’ connection is less meaningful, as members have a more adaptable sense of cultural identity, linked to a global scene made possible by the internet and migration. In Australia, attachment seems stronger to locality rather than nation or region, to place of birth in Britain and place of residence in Perth, two places which represent ‘home’. Northern Soul appears to work well for all members because it provides both continuity and change. As Mercieca et al. suggested of the scene (71) “there is potential for new meanings to continue to emerge”.ConclusionThe elements of expression and directional manoeuvres of Northern Soul dancing, symbolise the individual and social negotiation of direction, place, space, identity and time. The sense of time and space travelled can create a feeling of being pushed forward without control. It can also produce an emotional pull backwards, like an elastic band being stretched. For those growing older and moving far from places of birth, these dynamics can be particularly challenging. Membership of global subcultures can clearly help to create successful migrations, providing third spaces/places (Soja 137) between home and host culture identities, as evidenced by the ‘Southern’ Northern Soul scene in Australia. For these once teenagers, now grandparents in Australia, connections to time and space have been both transformed and transcended. They remain grounded in their youth, but have reduced the gravitational force of home connections, projecting themselves forward into the future by balancing aspects of both stability and mobility. Physical places and places and their connections with culture have been replaced by multiple and overlapping mappings, but it is important not to romanticise notions of agency, hybridity, third spaces and “deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). In a globalised world, most people are still located geographically and labelled ideologically. The Northern Soul repurposing of the culture indicates a transilience (Richmond 328) “differentially available to those in different locations in the field of power” (Gupta and Ferguson 20). However, the way in which Northern Soul has moved south over the decade via migration, has arguably now provided a stronger possible sense of resonance with the lives of black Americans whose lives in places like Chicago and Detroit in the 1960s, and their wonderful music, are grounded in the experience of family migrations in the opposite direction from the South to the North (Mercieca et al. 11). In such a celebration of “memory, loss, and nostalgia” (Gupta and Ferguson 13), it may still be possible to move beyond the exclusion that characterises defensive identities.ReferencesAugé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2008.Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975Browne, Kimasi L. "Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene." Proceedings of Manchester Music & Place Conference. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University. Vol. 8. 2006.Buchan, Iain E., Evangelos Kontopantelis, Matthew Sperrin, Tarani Chandola, and Tim Doran. "North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study." Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 71 (2017): 928-936.Chambers, Iain. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1985.Cosgrove, Stuart. "Long after Tonight Is All Over." Collusion 2 (1982): 38-41.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892.Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.Fowler, Pete. "Skins Rule." The Beat Goes On: The Rock File Reader. Ed. Charlie Gillett. London: Pluto Press, 1972. 10-26.Frith, Simon, and Tony Cummings. “Playing Records.” Rock File 3. Eds. Charlie Gillett and Simon Frith. St Albans: Panther, 1975. 21–48.Godin, Dave. “The Dave Godin Column”. Blues and Soul 67 (1971).Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 6-23.Hollows, Joanne, and Katie Milestone. "Welcome to Dreamsville: A History and Geography of Northern Soul." The Place of Music. Eds. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill. New York: The Guilford Press, 1998. 83-103.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McRobbie, Angela. "Dance and Social Fantasy." Gender and Generation. Eds. Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984. 130-161.Mercieca, Paul, Anne Chapman, and Marnie O'Neill. To the Ends of the Earth: Northern Soul and Southern Nights in Western Australia. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013.Milestone, Katie. "Love Factory: The Sites, Practices and Media Relationships of Northern Soul." The Clubcultures Reader. Eds. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne, and Justin O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 134-149.Morris, David. The Sense of Space. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004.Nowell, David. Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul. London: Robson, 1999.Pruter, Robert. Chicago Soul. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.Richmond, Anthony H. "Sociology of Migration in Industrial and Post-Industrial Societies." Migration (1969): 238-281.Ritson, Mike, and Stuart Russell. The In Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene. London: Robson, 1999.Roberts, Robert. The Classic Slum. London: Penguin, 1971.Rylatt, Keith, and Phil Scott. Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel Club. London: Bee Cool, 2001.Soja, Edward W. "Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places." Capital & Class 22.1 (1998): 137-139.This England. TV documentary. Manchester: Granada Television, 1977.Wall, Tim. "Out on the Floor: The Politics of Dancing on the Northern Soul Scene." Popular Music 25.3 (2006): 431-445.Wilson, Andrew. Northern Soul: Music, Drugs and Subcultural Identity. Cullompton: Willan, 2007.Winstanley, Russ, and David Nowell. Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story. London: Robson, 1996.Wunderlich, Filipa Matos. "Place-Temporality and Urban Place-Rhythms in Urban Analysis and Design: An Aesthetic Akin to Music." Journal of Urban Design 18.3 (2013): 383-408.

Abstract:

Introduction Greater resilience is associated with the ability to self-organise, and with social learning as part of a process of adaptation and transformation (Goldstein 341). This article deals with responses to a crisis in a Norwegian community in the late 1880s, and with some of the many internal conflicts it caused. The crisis and the subsequent conflicts in this particular community, Volda, were caused by a number of processes, driven mostly by external forces and closely linked to the expansion of the capitalist mode of production in rural Norway. But the crisis also reflects a growing nationalism in Norway. In the late 1880s, all these causes seemed to come together in Volda, a small community consisting mostly of independent small farmers and of fishers. The article employs the concept of ‘resilience’ and the theory of resilience in order better to understand how individuals and the community reacted to crisis and conflict in Volda in late 1880, experiences which will cast light on the history of the late 1880s in Volda, and on individuals and communities elsewhere which have also experienced such crises. Theoretical Perspectives Some understandings of social resilience inspired by systems theory and ecology focus on a society’s ability to maintain existing structures. Reducing conflict to promote greater collaboration and resilience, however, may become a reactionary strategy, perpetuating inequalities (Arthur, Friend and Marschke). Instead, the understanding of resilience could be enriched by drawing on ecological perspectives that see conflict as an integral aspect of a diverse ecology in continuous development. In the same vein, Grove has argued that some approaches to anticipatory politics fashion subjects to withstand ‘shocks and responding to adversity through modern institutions such as human rights and the social contract, rather than mobilising against the sources of insecurity’. As an alternative, radical politics of resilience ought to explore political alternatives to the existing order of things. Methodology According to Hall and Lamont, understanding “how individuals, communities, and societies secured their well-being” in the face of the challenges imposed by neoliberalism is a “problem of understanding the bases for social resilience”. This article takes a similarly broad approach to understanding resilience, focusing on a small group of people within a relatively small community to understand how they attempted to secure their well-being in the face of the challenges posed by capitalism and growing nationalism. The main interest, however, is not resilience understood as something that exists or is being produced within this small group, but, rather, how this group produced social imaginaries of the past and the future in cooperation and conflict with other groups in the same community. The research proceeds to analyse the contributions mainly of six members of this small group. It draws on existing literature on the history of the community in the late 1800s and, in particular, biographies of Synnøve Riste (Øyehaug) and Rasmus Steinsvik (Gausemel). In addition, the research builds on original empirical research of approximately 500 articles written by the members of the group in the period from 1887 to 1895 and published in the newspapers Vestmannen, Fedraheimen and 17de Mai; and will try to re-tell a history of key events, referring to a selection of these articles. A Story about Being a Woman in Volda in the Late 1880s This history begins with a letter from Synnøve Riste, a young peasant woman and daughter of a local member of parliament, to Anders Hovden, a friend and theology student. In the letter, Synnøve Riste told her friend about something she just had experienced and had found disturbing (more details in Øyehaug). She first sets her story in the context of an evangelical awakening that was gaining momentum in the community. There was one preacher in particular who seemed to have become very popular among the young women. He had few problems when it comes to women, she wrote, ironically. Curious about the whole thing, Synnøve decided to attend a meeting to see for herself what was going on. The preacher noticed her among the group of young women. He turned his attention towards her and scolded her for her apparent lack of religious fervour. In the letter she explained the feeling of shame that came over her when the preacher singled her out for public criticism. But the feeling of shame soon gave way to anger, she wrote, before adding that the worst part of it was ‘not being able to speak back’; as a woman at a religious meeting she had to hold her tongue. Synnøve Riste was worried about the consequences of the religious awakening. She asked her friend to do something. Could he perhaps write a poem for the weekly newspaper the group had begun to publish only a few months earlier? Anders Hovden duly complied. The poem was published, anonymously, on Wednesday 17 March 1888. Previously, the poem says, women enjoyed the freedom to roam the mountains and valleys. Now, however, a dark mood had come over the young women. ‘Use your mind! Let the madness end! Throw off the blood sucker! And let the world see that you are a woman!’ The puritans appreciated neither the poem nor the newspaper. The newspaper was published by the same group of young men and women who had already organised a private language school for those who wanted to learn to read and write New Norwegian, a ‘new’ language based on the old dialects stemming from the time before Norway lost its independence and became a part of Denmark and then, after 1814, Sweden. At the language school the students read and discussed translations of Karl Marx and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The newspaper quickly grew radical. It reported on the riots following the hanging of the Haymarket Anarchists in Chicago in 1886. It advocated women’s suffrage, agitated against capitalism, argued that peasants and small farmers must learn solidarity from the industrial workers defended a young woman in Oslo who was convicted of killing her newborn baby and published articles from international socialist and anarchist newspapers and magazines. Social Causes for Individual Resilience and Collaborative Resilience Recent literature on developmental psychology link resilience to ‘the availability of close attachments or a supportive and disciplined environment’ (Hall and Lamont 13). Some psychologists have studied how individuals feel empowered or constrained by their environment. Synnøve Riste clearly felt constrained by developments in her social world, but was also resourceful enough to find ways to resist and engage in transformational social action on many levels. According to contemporary testimonies, Synnøve Riste must have been an extraordinary woman (Steinsvik "Synnøve Riste"). She was born Synnøve Aarflot, but later married Per Riste and took his family name. The Aarflot family was relatively well-off and locally influential, although the farms were quite small by European standards. Both her father and her uncle served as members of parliament for the (‘left’) Liberal Party. From a young age she took responsibility for her younger siblings and for the family farm, as her father spent much time in the capital. Her grandfather had been granted the privilege of printing books and newspapers, which meant that she grew up with easy access to current news and debates. She married a man of her own choosing; a man substantially older than herself, but with a reputation for liberal ideas on language, education and social issues. Psychological approaches to resilience consider the influence of cognitive ability, self-perception and emotional regulation, in addition to social networks and community support, as important sources of resilience (Lamont, Welburn and Fleming). Synnøve Riste’s friend and lover, Rasmus Steinsvik, later described her as ‘a mainspring’ of social activity. She did not only rely on family, social networks and community support to resist stigmatisation from the puritans, but she was herself a driving force behind social activities that produced new knowledge and generated communities of support for others. Lamont, Welburn and Fleming underline the importance for social resilience of cultural repertoires and the availability of ‘alternative ways of understanding social reality’ (Lamont, Welburn and Fleming). Many of the social activities Synnøve Riste instigated served as arenas for debate and collaborative activity to develop alternative understandings of the social reality of the community. In 1887, Synnøve Riste had relied on support from her extended family to found the newspaper Vestmannen, but as the group around the language school and newspaper gradually produced more radical alternative understandings of the social reality they came increasingly into conflict with less radical members of the Liberal Party. Her uncle owned the printing press where Vestmannen was printed. He was also a member of parliament seeking re-election. And he was certainly not amused when Rasmus Steinsvik, editor of Vestmannen, published an article reprimanding him for his lacklustre performance in general and his unprincipled voting in support of a budget allocating the Swedish king a substantial amount of money. Steinsvik advised the readers to vote instead for Per Riste, Synnøve Riste’s liberal husband and director of the language school. The uncle stopped printing the newspaper. Social Resilience in Volda The growing social conflicts in Volda might be taken to indicate a lack of resilience. This, however, would be a mistake. Social connectedness is an important source of social resilience (Barnes and Hall 226). Strong ties to family and friends matter, as does membership in associations. Dense networks of social connectedness are related to well-being and social resilience. Inversely, high levels of inequality seem to be linked to low levels of resilience. Participation in democratic processes has also been found to be an important source of resilience (Barnes and Hall 229). Volda was a small community with relatively low levels of inequality and local cultural traditions underlining the importance of cooperation and the obligations of everyone to participate in various forms of communal work. Similarly, even though a couple of families dominated local politics, there was no significant socioeconomic division between the average and the more prosperous farmers. Traditionally, women on the small, independent farms participated actively in most aspects of social life. Volda would thus score high on most indicators predicting social resilience. Reading the local newspapers confirms this impression of high levels of social resilience. In fact, this small community of only a few hundred families produced two competing newspapers at the time. Vestmannen dedicated ample space to issues related to education and schools, including adult education, reflecting the fact that Volda was emerging as a local educational centre; local youths attending schools outside the community regularly wrote articles in the newspaper to share the new knowledge they had attained with other members of the community. The topics were in large part related to farming, earth sciences, meteorology and fisheries. Vestmannen also reported on other local associations and activities. The local newspapers reported on numerous political meetings and public debates. The Liberal Party was traditionally the strongest political party in Volda and pushed for greater independence from Sweden, but was divided between moderates and radicals. The radicals joined workers and socialists in demanding universal suffrage, including, as we have seen, women’s right to vote. The left libertarians in Volda organised a ‘radical left’ faction of the Liberal Party and in the run-up to the elections in 1888 numerous rallies were arranged. In some parts of the municipality the youth set up independent and often quite radical youth organisations, while others established a ‘book discussion’. The language issue developed into a particularly powerful source for social resilience. All members of the community shared the experience of having to write and speak a foreign language when communicating with authorities or during higher education. It was a shared experience of discrimination that contributed to producing a common identity. Hing has shown that those who value their in-group ‘can draw on this positive identity to provide a sense of self-worth that offers resilience’. The struggle for recognition stimulated locals to arrange independent activities, and it was in fact through the burgeoning movement for a New Norwegian language that the local radicals in Volda first encountered radical literature that helped them reframe the problems and issues of their social world. In his biography of Ivar Mortensson Egnund, editor of the newspaper Fedraheimen and a lifelong collaborator of Rasmus Steinsvik, Klaus Langen has argued that Mortensson Egnund saw the ideal type of community imagined by the anarchist Leo Tolstoy in the small Norwegian communities of independent small farmers, a potential model for cooperation, participation and freedom. It was not an uncritical perspective, however. The left libertarians were constantly involved in clashes with what they saw as repressive forces within the communities. It is probably more correct to say that they believed that the potential existed, within these communities, for freedom to flourish. Most importantly, however, reading Fedraheimen, and particularly the journalist, editor and novelist Arne Garborg, infused this group of local radicals with anti-capitalist perspectives to be used to make sense of the processes of change that affected the community. One of Garborg’s biographers, claims that no Norwegian has ever been more fundamentally anti-capitalist than Garborg (Thesen). This anti-capitalism helped the radicals in Volda to understand the local conflicts and the evangelical awakening as symptoms of a deeper and more fundamental development driven by capitalism. A series of article in Vestmannen called for solidarity and unity between small farmers and the growing urban class of industrial workers. Science and Modernity The left libertarians put their hope in science and modernity to improve the lives of people. They believed that education was the key to move forward and get rid of the old and bad ways of doing things. The newspaper was reporting the latest advances in natural sciences and life sciences. It reported enthusiastically about the marvels of electricity, and speculated about a future in which Norway could exploit the waterfalls to generate it on a large scale. Vestmannen printed articles in defence of Darwinism (Egnund), new insights from astronomy (Steinsvik "Kva Den Nye Astronomien"), health sciences, agronomy, new methods of fishing and farming – and much more. This was a time when such matters mattered. Reports on new advances in meteorology in the newspaper appeared next to harrowing reports about the devastating effects of a storm that surprised local fishermen at sea where many men regularly paid with their lives. Hunger was still a constant threat in the harsh winter months, so new knowledge that could improve the harvest was most welcome. Leprosy and other diseases continued to be serious problems in this region of Norway. Health could not be taken lightly, and the left libertarians believed that science and knowledge was the only way forward. ‘Knowledge is a sweet fruit,’ Vestmannen wrote. Reporting on Darwinism and astronomy again pitted Vestmannen against the puritans. On several occasions the newspaper reported on confrontations between those who promoted science and those who defended a fundamentalist view of the Bible. In November 1888 the signature ‘-t’ published an article on a meeting that had taken place a few days earlier in a small village not far from Volda (Unknown). The article described how local teachers and other participants were scolded for holding liberal views on science and religion. Anyone who expressed the view that the Bible should not be interpreted literally risked being stigmatised and ostracised. It is tempting to label the group of left libertarians ‘positivists’ or ‘modernists’, but that would be unfair. Arne Garborg, the group’s most important source of inspiration, was indeed inspired by Émile Zola and the French naturalists. Garborg had argued that nothing less than the uncompromising search for truth was acceptable. Nevertheless, he did not believe in objectivity; Garborg and his followers agreed that it was not possible or even desirable to be anything else than subjective. Adaptation or Transformation? PM Giærder, a friend of Rasmus Steinsvik’s, built a new printing press with the help of local blacksmiths, so the newspaper could keep afloat for a few more months. Finally, however, in 1888, the editor and the printer took the printing press with them and moved to Tynset, another small community to the east. There they joined forces with another dwindling left libertarian publication, Fedraheimen. Generations later, more details emerged about the hurried exit from Volda. Synnøve Riste had become pregnant, but not by her husband Per. She was pregnant by Rasmus Steinsvik, the editor of Vestmannen and co-founder of the language school. And then, after giving birth to a baby daughter she fell ill and died. The former friends Per and Rasmus were now enemies and the group of left libertarians in Volda fell apart. It would be too easy to conclude that the left libertarians failed to transform the community and a closer look would reveal a more nuanced picture. Key members of the radical group went on to play important roles on the local and national political scene. Locally, the remaining members of the group formed new alliances with former opponents to continue the language struggle. The local church gradually began to sympathise with those who agitated for a new language based on the Norwegian dialects. The radical faction of the Liberal Party grew in importance as the conflict with Sweden over the hated union intensified. The anarchists Garborg and Steinsvik became successful editors of a radical national newspaper, 17de Mai, while two other members of the small group of radicals went on to become mayors of Volda. One was later elected member of parliament for the Liberal Party. Many of the more radical anarchist and communist ideas failed to make an impact on society. However, on issues such as women’s rights, voting and science, the left libertarians left a lasting impression on the community. It is fair to say that they contributed to transforming their society in many and lasting ways. Conclusion This study of crisis and conflict in Volda indicate that conflict can play an important role in social learning and collective creativity in resilient communities. There is a tendency, in parts of resilience literature, to view resilient communities as harmonious wholes without rifts or clashes of interests (see for instance Goldstein; Arthur, Friend and Marschke). Instead, conflicts should rather be understood as a natural aspect of any society adapting and transforming itself to respond to crisis. Future research on social resilience could benefit from an ecological understanding of nature that accepts polarisation and conflict as a natural part of ecology and which helps us to reach deeper understandings of the social world, also fostering learning, creativity and the production of alternative political solutions. This research has indicated the importance of social imaginaries of the past. Collective memories of ‘what everybody knows that everybody else knows’ about ‘what has worked in the past’ form the basis for producing ideas about how to create collective action (Swidler 338, 39). Historical institutions are pivotal in producing schemas which are default options for collective action. In Volda, the left libertarians imagined a potential for freedom in the past of the community; this formed the basis for producing an alternative social imaginary of the future of the community. The social imaginary was not, however, based only on local experience and collective memory of the past. Theories played an important role in the process of trying to understand the past and the present in order to imagine future alternatives. The conflicts themselves stimulated the radicals to search more widely and probe more deeply for alternative explanations to the problems they experienced. This search led them to new insights which were sometimes adopted by the local community and, in some cases, helped to transform social life in the long-run. References Arthur, Robert, Richard Friend, and Melissa Marschke. "Fostering Collaborative Resilience through Adaptive Comanagement: Reconciling Theory and Practice in the Management of Fisheries in the Mekong Region." Collaborative Resilience: Moving through Crisis to Opportunity. Ed. Bruce Evan Goldstein. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2012. 255-282. Barnes, Lucy, and Peter A. Hall. "Neoliberalism and Social Resilience in the Developed Democracies." Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Eds. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 209-238. Egnund, Ivar Mortensson. "Motsetningar." Vestmannen 13.6 (1889): 3. Gausemel, Steffen. Rasmus Steinsvik. Oslo: Noregs boklag, 1937. Goldstein, Bruce Evan. "Collaborating for Transformative Resilience." Collaborative Resilience: Moving through Crisis to Opportunity. Ed. Bruce Evan Goldstein. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2012. 339-358. Hall, Peter A., and Michèle Lamont. "Introduction." Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Eds. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Lamont, Michèle, Jessica S Welburn, and Crystal M Fleming. "Responses to Discrimination and Social Resilience under Neoliberalism: The United States Compared." Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Eds. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 129-57. Steinsvik, Rasmus. "Kva Den Nye Astronomien Kan Lære Oss." Vestmannen 8.2 (1889): 1. ———. "Synnøve Riste." Obituary. Vestmannen 9.11 (1889): 1. Swidler, Ann. "Cultural Sources of Institutional Resilience: Lessons from Chieftaincy in Rural Malawi." Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Eds. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Abstract:

The bodies of disordered women … offer themselves as an aggressively graphic text for the interpreter—a text that insists, actually demands, that it be read as a cultural statement, a statement about gender. (Bordo, 94)Violence is transgressive in fundamental ways. It erases boundaries, and imposes agency over others, or groups of others. The assumed social stance is to disapprove, morally and ethically, as a ‘good’ and ‘moral’ female subject. My current research has made me question the simplicity of this approach, to interrogate how aggression socialises power and how resistance to structural violence might look. I analyse three cultural practices to consider the social demarcations around aggression and gender, both within overt acts of violence and in less overt protocols. This research will focus on artistic practices as they offer unique embodied ways to “challenge our systems of representation and knowledge” (Szylak 2).The three creative works reviewed: the 2009 Swedish film the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the work Becoming an Image by Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils, and Gambit Lines, by artist Carolyn Craig, each contest gendered modes of normativity within the space of the Cultural Screen (Silverman). The character of Lisbeth Salander in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo subverts the aggressor female/femme fatale trope in Western cinema by confusing and expanding visual repertoires around aggression, while artists Cassils and Carolyn Craig re-draw how their biologically assigned female bodies perform power in the Cultural Screen by activating bodily feedback loops for the viewer’s gaze.The Aggressor ModeThe discussion of these three works will centre on the ‘female aggressor trope’, understood here as the static coda of visual practices of female power/aggression in the western gaze. This article considers how subverting such representations of aggression can trigger an “epistemic crisis that allows gender categories to change,” in particular in the way protocols of power are performed over female and trans subjectivities (Butler, Athletic 105). The tran/non-binary subject state in the work of Cassils is included in this discussion of the female aggressor trope as their work directly subverts the biological habitus of the female body, that is, the artist’s birth/biologically assigned gender (Bourdieu). The transgender state they perform – where the body is still visibly female but refusing its constraints - offers a radical framework to consider new aggressive stances for non-biologically male bodies.The Cultural Screen and Visual RepresentationsI consider that aggression, when performed through the mediated position of a creative visual practice (as a fictional site of becoming) can deconstruct the textual citations that form normative tropes in the Cultural Screen. The Screen, for this article, is considered asthe site at which the gaze is defined for a particular society, and is consequently responsible both for the way in which the inhabitants of that society experience the gaze’s effects, and for much of the seeming particularity of that society’s visual regime. (Silverman 135)The Screen functions as a suite of agreed metaphors that constitute a plane of ‘reality’ that defines how we perform the self (Goffman). It comprises bodily performance, our internal gaze (of self and other) and the visual artefacts a culture produces. Each of the three works discussed here purposely intervenes with this site of gender production within the Cultural Screen, by creating new visual artefacts that expand permissible aggressive repertoires for female assigned bodies. Deconstructing the Cultural ScreenThe history of images … can be read as a cultural history of the human body. (Belting 17)Cinematic representations play a key role in producing the visual primers that generate social ‘acts’. For this reason I examine the Swedish film Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women, 2009), released as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for foreign audiences, as an example of an expanding range of female aggressor representations in film, and one of particular complexity in the way it expands on representational politics. I consider how specific scripting, dialogue and casting decisions in the lead female character of Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace) serve to deconstruct the female aggressor trope (as criminal or sexual provocateur) to allow her character to engage in aggressive acts outside of the cliché of the deviant woman. This disrupts the fixity of assigned body protocols on the social grid to expand their gendered habitus (Bourdieu).Key semiotic relations in the film’s characterisation of Lisbeth prevent her performance of aggression from moving into the clichés of erotic or evil feminine typologies. Her character remains unfixed, moving between a continuous state of unfolding in response to necessity and desire. Here, she exhibits an agency usually denoting masculinity. This allows her violence a positive emancipatory affect, one that avoids the fixity of the representational tropes of the deviant woman or the femme fatale. Her character draws upon both tropes, but reformulates them into a postmodern hybridity, where aggression slips from its sexualised/deviant fetish state into an athletic political resistance. Signification is strategically confused as Lisbeth struts through the scaffolding of normalcy in her insurgent gender game. Her post-punk weaponised attire draws on the repertoire of super heroes, rock stars and bondage mistresses, without committing to any. The libidinal component of violence/aggression is not avoided, but acknowledged, both in its patriarchal formula and Lisbeth’s enactment of revenge as embodied pleasure.The visual representation of both lead actors is also of interest. Both Lisbeth and Mikael have visible acne scars. This small breach in aesthetic selection affects how we view and consume them as subjects and objects on the Screen. The standard social more for the appearance of male and female leads is to use faces modeled on ideas of symmetry and perfection. These tendencies draw upon the cultural legacies of physiognomy that linked moral character with attractiveness schedules and that continue to flourish in the Cultural Screen (Lavater; Principe and Langlois). This decision to feature faces with minor flaws appropriates the camera’s gaze to re-consider schedules of normalcy, in particular value and image index as they relate to gendered representations. This aesthetic erasure of the Western tradition of stereotyped representations permits transitional spaces to emerge within the binary onslaught. Technology is also appropriated in the film as a space for a performative ‘switching’ of the gender codes of fixity. In her role as undercover researcher, Lisbeth’s control of code gives her both a monetised agency and an informational agency. The way that she types takes on an almost aggressive assertion. Each stroke is active and purposeful, as she exerts control through her interface with digital space. This is made explicit early in the film when she appropriates the gaze of technology (a particularly male semiotic code) to extract agency from within the structural discourse of patriarchy itself. In this scene, she forces her guardian to watch footage of his own act of raping her. Here Lisbeth uses the apparatus of the gaze to re-inscribe it back over his body. This structural inversion of the devices of control is made even more explicit when Lisbeth then brands him with text. Here ‘writing on the body’ becomes manifest.The director also frames initial scenes of Lisbeth’s nude body in subtle ways that fracture the entrenched history of representations of women, where the female as object exists for the gaze of male desire (Berger). Initially all we see are her shoulders. They are powerful and she moves like a boxer, inhabiting space and flexing her sinew. When we do see her breasts, they are neutered from the dominant coda of the “breasted experience” (Young). Instead, they function as a necessary appendage that she acknowledges as part of the technology of her body, not as objectified male desire.These varied representational modes built within Lisbeth’s characterisation, inhabit and subvert the female aggressor trope (as deviant), to offer a more nuanced portrayal where the feminine is still worn, but as both a masquerade and an internal emancipatory dialogue. That is, the feminine is permitted to remain whilst the masculine (as aggressive code) is intertwined into non-binary relations of embodied agency. This fluidity refracts the male gaze from imposing spectatorial control via the gaze.Cassils The Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils also uses the body as semiotic technology to deny submission to the dominant code of the Cultural Screen. They re-image the self with bodybuilding, diet and steroids to exit their biologically female structural discourse into a more fluid gendered state. This state remains transitive as their body is not surgically ‘reassigned ‘ back into normative codes (male or female assignations) but instead inhabits the trans pronoun of ‘they/their’. This challenges the Cultural Screen’s dependence on fixed binary states through which to allocate privilege. This visible reshaping also permits entry into more aggressive bodily protocols via the gaze (through the spectorial viewpoint of self and other).Cassils ruptures the restrictive habitus of female/trans subjectivity to enable more expansive gestures in the social sphere, and a more assertive bodily performance. This is achieved by appropriating the citational apparatus of male aggression via a visual reframing of its actions. Through daily repetitive athletic training Cassils activates the proprioceptive loops that inform their gendered schema and the presentation of self (Goffman). This training re-scripts their socially inscribed gender code with semiotically switched gender ‘acts’. This altered subjectivity is made visible for the viewer through performance to destablise the Screen of representation further via the observers’ gaze.In their work Becoming an Image (2012- current), Cassils performs against a nine hundred kilogram lump of clay for twenty minutes in complete darkness, fractured only by an intermittent camera flash that documents the action. This performance contests the social processes that formulate the subject as ‘image’. By using bodily force (aggressive power) against an inert lump of clay, Cassils enacts the frustration and affect that the disenfranchised Other feels from their own gender shaping (Bhaba). The images taken by the camera during this performance reflect a ferocious refusal, an animal intent, a state of battle. The marks and residues of their bodily ‘acts’ shape the clay in an endurance archive of resistance, where the body’s trace/print forms the material itself along with the semiotic residue of the violence against transgender and female bodies. In some ways, the body of Cassils and the body of clay confront each other through Cassils’s aggressive remolding of the material of social discourse itself.The complicity of photography in sustaining representational discourse is highlighted within Cassils’s work through the intertextual rupturing of the performance with the camera flash and through the title of the work. To Become an Image invokes the processes of the darkroom itself, where the photographer controls image development, whilst the aggressive flash reflects the snapshot of violence, where the gendered subject is ‘imaged’ (formulated and confined) without permission by the observer schedules of patriarchy. The flash also leaves a residual trace in the retinas of the viewer, a kind of image burn, perhaps chosen to mimic the fear, intrusion and coercion that normalcy’s violence impinges over Othered subjects. The artist converts these flash generated images into wallpaper that is installed into the gallery space, usually the day after the performance. Thus, Cassils’s corporeal space is re-inscribed onto the walls of the institutional archive of representations – to evoke both the domestic (wallpaper as home décor), the public domain (the white walls of institutional rhetoric) and the Cultural Screen.Carolyn Craig The work of Carolyn Craig also targets representations that substantiate the Cultural Screen. She uses performative modes in the studio to unravel her own subjective habitus, in particular targeting the codes that align female aggression with deviancy. Her work isolates the action of making a fist to re-inscribe how the aggression code is ‘read’ as embodied knowledge by women. Two key articles by Thomas Schubert that investigated how making a fist is perceived differently between genders (in terms of interiorised power) informed her research. Both studies found that when males make a fist they experience an enhanced sense of power, while women did not. In fact, in the studies, they experienced a slight decrease in their sense of comfort in the world (their embodied sense of agency). Schubert surmised this reflected gender-based protocols in relation to the permissible display of aggression, as “men are culturally less discouraged to use bodily force, which will frequently be associated with success and power gain [whilst women] are culturally discouraged from using bodily force” (Schubert 758). These studies suggest how anchored gestures of aggression are to male power schemas and their almost inaccessibility to women. When artists re-formulate such (existing) input algorithms by inserting new representations of female aggression into the Cultural Screen, they sever the display of aggression from the exclusive domain of the masculine. This circulates and incorporates a broader visual code that informs conceptual relations of power.Craig performs the fisting action in the studio to neuter this existing code using endurance, repetition and parody (fig. 1). Parody activates a Bakhtian space of Carnivalesque, a unique space in the western cultural tradition that permits transgressive inversions of gender, power and normativity (Hutcheon). By making and remaking a fist through an absurdist lens, the social scaffolding attached to the action (fear, anxiety, transgression) is diluted. Repetition and humour breaks down the existing code, and integrates new perceptual schema through the body itself. Parody becomes a space of slippage, one that is a precursor to a process of (re)constitution within the social screen, so that Craig can “produce representation” rather than be (re)presentation (Schneider 51). This transitory state of Carnivalesque produces new relational fields (both bodily and visual) that are then projected back into the Screen of normativity to further dislodge gender fixity. Figure 1: Carolyn Craig, Gambit Lines (Angles of Incidence #1), 2016. Etchings from performance on folded aluminium, 25.5 x 34 x 21cm. This nullifies the power of the static image of deviancy (the woman as specimen) and ferments leakages into broader representational fields. Craig’s fisting actions target the proprioceptive feedback loops that make women fear their own bodies’ potential of violence, that make us retreat from the citational acts of aggression. Her work tilts embodied retreat (as fear) through the distorted mimesis of parody to initiate a Deleuzian space of agentic potential (Deleuze and Guattari). This is re-inserted into the Cultural Screen as suites of etchings grounded in the representational politics, and historical genealogy of printed matter, to bring the historical conditions of formation of knowledge into review.Conclusion The aggressor trope as used within the works discussed, produces a more varied representational subject. This fosters subjectivities outside the restraints of normativity and its imposed gendered habitus. The performance of aggression by bodies not permissibly branded to script such acts forces static representations embedded through the Cultural Screen into “an unstable and troubled terrain, a crisis of knowledge, a situation of not-knowing”. This state of representational confusion leads to a “risking of gender itself … that exposes our knowledge about gender as tenuous, contested, and ungrounded in a thorough and productively disturbing sense” (Butler, Athletic 110). Tropes that define binary privilege, when dislodged in such a way, become accessible to fluidity or erasure. This allows more nuanced gender allocation to schedules of power.The Cultural Screen produces and projects the metaphors we live by and its relations to power are concrete (Johnson and Lakoff). Even small-scale incursions into masculine domains of agency (such as the visual display of aggression) have a direct correlation to the allocation of resources, both spatial, economic and subjective. The use of the visual can re-train the conceptual parameters of the cultural matrix to chip small ways forward to occupy space with our bodies and intellects, to assume more aggressive stances in public, to speak over people if I feel the need, and to be rewarded for such actions in a social context. I still feel unable to propose direct violence as a useful action but I do admit to having a small poster of Phoolan Devi in my home and my admiration for such women is deep.ReferencesBelting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 2008.Bhaba, Homi. "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures. Eds. Russell Ferguson and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990. 71-89.Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy et al. New York: Colombia UP, 1997. 90-110.Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.Butler, Judith. “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism.” Stanford Humanities Review 6 (1998): 103-111.———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal (1988): 519–31.Cassils. Becoming an Image. ONE Archive, Los Angeles. Original performance. 2012.Craig, Carolyn. “Gambit Lines." The Deviant Woman. POP Gallery, Brisbane. 2016.Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Män Som Hatar Kvinnor]. Dir. Niels Arden Oplev. Stockholm: Yellowbird, 2009.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Allen Lane, 1969.Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985.Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.Lavater, John Caspar. Essays in Physiognomy Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind. Vol. 1. London: Murray and Highley, 1789.Principe, Connor, and Judith Langlois. "Shifting the Prototype: Experience with Faces Influences Affective and Attractiveness Preferences." Social Cognition 30.1 (2012): 109-120.Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997.Schubert, Thomas W., and Sander L. Koole. “The Embodied Self: Making a Fist Enhances Men’s Power-Related Self-Conceptions.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45.4 (2009): 828–834.Schubert, Thomas W. “The Power in Your Hand: Gender Differences in Bodily Feedback from Making a Fist.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30.6 (2004): 757–769.Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.Szylak, Aneta. The Field Is to the Sky, Only Backwards. Brooklyn, NY: International Studio and Curatorial Program, 2013.Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling.” On Female Body Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Abstract:

In The Threshold of the Visible World, Kaja Silverman advances a subtle, ethical, post-Lacanian account of what constitutes “the active gift of love” and how this might be expressed on the screen. She argues for an orientation of subject to love object which is not merely an alternative to romantic passion, but an account of how identification of the loving subject and love object “might function in a way that results in neither the triumph of self-sameness, nor craven submission to an exteriorised but essentialized ideal”. In a move particularly relevant to our focus in this paper, she goes on to suggest that a gift of love so constituted entails an escape from conformity with culturally dictated ideals and thence a capacity “to put ourselves in a positive identificatory relation to bodies which we have been taught to abhor and repudiate” (79). Two lesbian/gay teen films of the late 1990s – Lukas Moodysson’s f*cking Åmål (1998; also known as Show Me Love) and Simon Shore’s Get Real (1999) – offer an illuminating contrast in the ways they deal with the possibility of the gift of love in the conflictual contexts both of teenage gay and lesbian love and sexuality, and of small-town spaces. Space solicits desire, but the sexual frisson that is evoked through encounters in various spaces in film depicted as offering excitement, risk, and bodily pleasures seems limited in three ways. First, the progression from desire to love is severely circ*mscribed by cultural presuppositions about the physical and social attributes of appropriate love objects. This is particularly evident in the Hollywood teen film, with its recurrent male and female Cinderella roles. Second, the desire represented is predominantly heterosexual, so the appropriate love object is further specified by the assumption of heteronormativity. Finally, there is a persistent attribution of space to woman and time to man – as early as the late eighteenth century William Blake had written, “Space is a woman” (in Bal 169) – and although this has been questioned by feminist thinkers (see Irigaray 1987) it still pervades filmic imagery. As Sue Best notes, the bounded spaces that people inhabit – “the nation, regions, cities and the home” – often rely on feminine metaphors to describe their attributes, contours, architecture; in the case of the romantic ‘home’, its enclosures suggest a warm, uterine space and maternal care. In a related sense, the open spaces of the countryside, the city streets and solitary travel have connoted a masculine space and prerogative (182-3). Traditionally, man moves through these spaces with a sense of temporal purpose, while woman bides her time in bounded domestic space. In f*cking Åmål, the film’s preoccupation with enclosed spaces, and especially the domestic spaces of home and school, on one hand generates an intense mood of claustrophobia while, on the other, communicates the terrifying aloneness of the young person abjected by the “in”-crowd. A measure of the inanity of the teenage boys of this small Swedish community is the unexamined misogyny of their spatial thinking, as when, for example, Jessica’s boyfriend Markus asserts that boys are interested in and understand technology, like cell phones, and that girls are instead good at things like "make-up and looking good". Get Real expresses the contrast more as that of outside and inside: the male domain of the sports field set against the interior space of the room where girls and boys like Steven (“I don’t smoke or play football and have an IQ over 25”) produce the school magazine. While these binaristic notions of gender and space serve as useful means for considering the restrictive nature of masculine and feminine constructions which still exist in various contemporary societies, they are also limited and limiting when it comes to thinking beyond a heterosexual framework. The imbrication of space and woman could account for the ongoing censure, disruption, and violation of feminised movement in so-called masculinised spaces. The notion of transgressing across spaces is the underlying theme of both Get Real and f*cking Åmål. Both films, with their “coming out” narratives, move away from conventional cinematic representations of teen love. Moreover, they provide a cinematic space in which the female or male body is a source of same-sex pleasure and desire, and offer viewers a space not defined by the other gender or by a narrative progress towards heterosexual romance and fulfilment. Consequently, the characters’ sensual/sexual encounters privilege bodily pleasure, response, and the ability to go beyond “the blind spot” of patriarchal sexuality (Irigaray 1985). Where they differ is that f*cking Åmål depicts Elin (the “love object”) progressing so far in her love for Agnes that her triumphant coming out is simultaneously an affirmation of a body universally abhorred and repudiated within the dominant youth community. There is no suggestion, for example, that Agnes will need to abandon her loose, oversized clothes and her trousers in favour of Elin’s short skirts and low-cut tops (although there is a hint that Elin may find Agnes’s intellectual interests more engrossing than the belated and etiolated versions of popular culture she has up until now inhabited). In contrast to f*cking Åmål, Get Real depicts the ultimate failure of John Dixon (the love object) to acknowledge love for Steven Carter, abhorred and repudiated by male peers for his suspected (and actual) hom*osexuality. Space is a shifting signifier which points to, but does not anchor, meaning across social, cultural, and territorial dimensions. In a Foucauldian sense, space is often linked to concepts of power. Furthermore, space, particularly queer space, becomes both a visual and metaphorical entity which needs to be interrogated in terms of its relationship to, and representation through, the eye of the beholder. In Get Real and f*cking Åmål “looking” becomes a complex play between characters and viewers. The specular logic that operates within the conventional notions of the gaze, with its underlying structure of a dominant subject and submissive object, is thus both interrogated and undercut (Mulvey). In Get Real a hole in a public toilet wall provides a spatial site for spying on illicit gay sexual encounters as well as a means for checking out a potential sexual partner. Such voyeurism is perverse as it disrupts the visual pleasure which has become intimately tied to patriarchal ideology with its structures of looking (male) and being looked at (female). This is one instance (and there are others in both films) when looking occupies a queer space, demonstrating complicity with voyeurism, desire, and visual pleasure, and disrupting the association of the gaze with rigid gender roles. The act of looking that the characters undertake also helps to make the viewer aware of the particular quality of their own gaze. The films contrive to position the viewer in ways that focus attention on the specific nature of his/her gaze as we become witness/voyeur to the characters’ spatial trajectories across private and public spaces - bedroom, toilet, home, school. Early in f*cking Åmål the gaze is invited and dismantled when Elin goes half undressed to try on clothes in front of the mirror in the apartment block’s lift, only to find that her sister Jessica has forgotten to bring the clothes. By overtly and comically replacing the narcissistic gaze with the gaze of the camera (and hence audience) the film problematizes looking, and begins to establish the situation whereby to look at Elin is to share the looking with Agnes, effectively queering the look. Further deconstructions of the look, or gaze, occur in the contrasting femme/butch representations of Elin and Agnes. The erotic pleasure of looking (at Elin) provides a counterpoint of gazes and highlights the vicissitudes of desire. While Elin’s sexy body and conventional beauty conform to an image of female desirability and make her the object of male fantasy, she is also the love object of Agnes. However, Elin’s feisty, restless character refuses any image of passive femininity. Rather, she embodies an active, desiring female subjectivity. Thus, the space of both female and male spectatorship is open to erotic imaginings. By contrast, the film undoes the tradition of fetishisation associated with the male gaze through the character of Agnes: she wears no makeup, hides her body in oversized clothing, and her hair is unadorned and simply styled. Thus, the camera’s attention to Agnes’s silent watching of Elin undermines the male gaze, creating a female gaze and a space of female desire. A comparable effect is achieved in Get Real when Steven uses his membership of the school magazine committee to suggest that a queer community exists within the school. First, and more subtly, the photographs he takes of John Dixon as school sporting hero queer the act of looking: Steven’s father, a professional photographer, sees them as examples of photographic art; John’s father views them as a celebration of a finely tuned athletic body; girls look at them heterosexually; but from Steven’s perspective they are gay pin-ups. The ground of a love relationship, as Silverman argues, is to posit the other rather than the self as the cause of desire, and hence to perceive perfection in the features of another and to celebrate that perceived perfection. This is the work performed by Steven’s photographs of John, and the irony inherent in the fact that the significance of the photographs depends on the interpretation of the beholder exemplifies how irony operates in these films to change how people interpret the “cultural screen”, the mental picture of society which they have naturalised. In f*cking Åmål, a class photograph of Elin in a school magazine also serves to queer the act of looking as it represents the love object of both Johan and Agnes. Whereas Johan cuts out Elin’s image, effectively excising her from the others in the photograph, and stores it in his wallet, Agnes is content to contemplate the image in the privacy of her bedroom, leaving it intact. Elin’s image has a strong erotic and visual impact on both Johan and Agnes, connoting “a to-be-looked-at-ness”, and the actions by Johan and Agnes to look and to possess can be understood in psychoanalytic terms as their attempt to turn the represented image into a fetish object (Mulvey). In a related way to Steven’s photograph of John Dixon as a gay pin-up, Agnes is able to reinvest erotically in the body of another woman. Steven’s second intervention by means of the magazine is to write the “Get Real” article about youth hom*osexuality. Once this is banned by the school Principal, it functions as a space of absence which defines and publicises the lack at the heart of the community. Further, in so far as it is lack which makes desire possible, Steven’s manifesto on a more individual level legitimises that lack for hom*osexual subjects. Get Real quite explicitly seeks to overturn the heterosexist stereotype of gays as lonely and unhappy figures, and to offer a different perspective on gay subjectivity and sexuality. f*cking Åmål performs the same work for the subjectivity and sexuality of young lesbians, as Agnes works through the trauma of her initial rejection by Elin and her “outing” at home, and Elin works through the identity crisis prompted by her emerging desire for Agnes. For each, the journey from abjection to joy ends triumphantly as, with no apparent threat of retribution, they redefine the significance of key spaces, of school and home. Both films use space to articulate the characters’ joys and anguish as they struggle with the conflicting effects of love and desire for another, the taunts they suffer from others because of their sexuality, and the eventual amelioration of the restrictions of their spatial location. While the gaze offers a metaphorical space for looking in Get Real and f*cking Åmål, space is also defined in regional and sexual terms. Elin and Agnes are space-bound characters, living within the claustrophobic confines of small town Åmål (Sweden). The original title of the film (f*cking Åmål), rather than the more bland, international release title (Show Me Love), captures teenage boredom with the stifling confines of their environment. Elin’s howls of exasperation give voice to her feelings of entrapment: “Why do we have to live in f*cking Åmål? When something’s ‘in’ in the rest of the world, it’s already ‘out’ by the time it gets here.” When Elin and Agnes attempt an escape by hitching a ride out of town, their make-out session in the backseat of their lift’s car is accompanied by Foreigner’s “I want to know what love is”; the interplay of song lyrics, the young lovers’ sexual play, and their eventual eviction from the car offering an ironic performance that rehearses the double meaning of the film’s title and the story’s vexed themes of subjection and subjectivity. The visual style of f*cking Åmål also adds to the pervading sense of containment that the young protagonists experience. Interior domestic scenes dominate and appear spatially constrained. Often a low-key colour scheme serves as an iconic sign indicating the metaphorical nature of the drabness of Åmål. Agnes, as a relative newcomer to Åmål, occupies the spatial fringe both in terms of her strangeness to the place and her perceived queerness. She is the subject of ridicule, innuendo, and ostracism by her peers. Agnes’s marginalisation and abjection are metaphorically expressed through camera framing and tracking – close-ups capture her feelings of rejection and aloneness, and her movements in public spaces, such as the school canteen and corridors, are often confined to the perimeters or the background. By contrast, Elin appears to be in the spatial centre as she is a popular and sexually desirable young woman. It is when she falls in love with Agnes that she too finds herself dislocated, both within her self and within her home town. The stifling confines of Åmål offer limited recreational spaces for its youth, with the urban shopping centre and park are places for congregation and social contact. Ironically, communal spaces, such as the school and the park, effect a spatial intimacy through proximity; yet, the heterosexual imperative that operates in these public and populated spaces compels Elin and Agnes to effect a spatial distance with its necessary emotional and physical separation. When Elin and Agnes finally ‘come out’, it is part of a broader teen rebellion against continuing ennui and oppressive strictures that limit their lives. Steven (Get Real) lives a privileged middle class life in Basingstoke (Hampshire, UK) although this is unsettled by a pervasive sense of hom*ophobic surveillance, locally and immediately embodied in the school’s masculinist bullies, but networked more widely through fathers, school principals, and the police. As Foucault argued, surveillance has a disciplinary function because individuals are made conscious that they are being watched and judged from a normalising perspective. This being so, even open spaces in Get Real have a claustrophobic effect. The park where Steven goes in quest of sexual contact thus signifies ambiguously: messages are passed from within the smallest space (a cubicle within the toilet) but once outside an individual’s presence can be registered by any neighbour, and the concealed spaces of the woodland are subjected to police raids. The film neatly ties this physical surveillance to mental surveillance when Steven’s father confronts him about being seen in the park when he was supposed to have been working on his essay project about youth in the contemporary world. For Steven, the project is a sham because he is only enabled to write from within the normalised perspective which excludes himself. Communication at the highest level available to him – a prize-winning essay in a public competition – thus denies him any subjective agency. The film’s ironic chain thus entails first the winning of the prize (but only because his father secretly submitted Steven’s discarded essay) and then Steven’s subsequent use of the award ceremony to present his other, suppressed essay and to declare his sexual orientation. In both films, gay and lesbian sexualities are constructed as paradoxical spaces. On the one hand, gay and lesbian desires and identities are distanced from the heterosexual paradigm, yet firmly embedded within it and (therefore subject to) hom*ophobic discourses. Difference is not tolerated. In f*cking Åmål, characters are marginalised because of physical and sexual difference; in Get Real, difference is defined in terms of class, sexuality, and hegemonic masculinity. Both films offer positive outcomes which affirm a resignification of the “cultural screen”. By depicting the dystopic effect of heteronormative society on the principal gay and lesbian characters, each film functions to highlight issues of access to and place within the spatial public sphere. From f*cking Åmål, indeed, we might infer that such strategies as the ironic transformation of the gaze have the potential to produce utopian visions. Despite the strategy of allowing Steven one further transformation of public space, when he seizes a public forum to deliver his coming-out speech, Get Real offers a less utopian vision, but still a firm sense that social space has undergone significant disruption. While Elin comes to accept and realise the value of Agnes’s original “gift of love” to her, John Dixon is unable to move beyond the restrictive confines of heteronormative space and therefore rejects Steven’s public and personal gift of love. Nevertheless, in both films, it is through the agential actions of Elin, Agnes, and Steven in publicly declaring their love for the other that serves as an active signifier, openly challenging the sexualised space of their school and community: a space that passively accepts the kind of orthodoxy that naturalises heterosexualised ways of looking and loving, and abhors and repudiates hom*osexual/lesbian desire. In this sense, there is an opening up of a queer space of desire which exerts its own form of resistance and defiance to patriarchal discourse. Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Best, Sue. “Sexualising space”. Eds. Elizabeth. Grosz & Elspeth Probyn Sexy Bodies: The strange Carnalities of Feminism. London & New York: Routledge, 1995. 181-194. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison. London: A. Lane (Penguin Books), 1977. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G.C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Irigaray, Luce. “Sexual difference”. Ed. Toril Moi, French Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 118-130. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan, 1989. 29-37. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996. Filmography f*cking Åmål (Show Me Love). Dir./writer Lukas Moodysson. WN Danubius/ITA Slovakia, 1998. Get Real. Dir. Simon Shore. Paramount, 1999. Links linenoise.co.uk (Accessed 31/10/02) cinephiles.net (Accessed 31/10/02) brightlightsfilm.com (Accessed 31/10.02) hollywood.com (Accessed 31/10/02) movie-reviews.colossus.net (Accessed 31/10/02) culturevulture.net (Accessed 31/10/02) english.lsu.edu (Accessed 3/11/02) Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mallan, Kerry and Stephens, John. "Love’s Coming (Out)" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovescomingout.php>. APA Style Mallan, K. & Stephens, J., (2002, Nov 20). Love’s Coming (Out). M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovescomingout.html

Abstract:

The concept of “softening the news” or “tabloidization” refers to the adaption of tabloid standards by elite media, as a result of competitive pressures and with the aim of attracting the attention of the mass audience (e.g., Magin, 2019). Reinemann et al. (2012) distinguish three important dimensions: topic dimension: According to this dimension, “soft news” can be distinguished from “hard news” by their political relevance; one can either determine the level of political relevance (Reinemann et al., 2012) or – as most studies do (e.g., Steiner, 2016) – distinguish between topics that can be classified as either hard (e.g., politics) or soft (e.g., crime, sports, lifestyle). focus dimension: Soft news in this respect reports on issues in a rather episodic and less thematic way which means that the news coverage focuses more on the event itself instead of framing the event in a more general context (Iyengar, 1991; see also Entman, 1993). Furthermore, soft news rather focuses on individual rather than societal consequences. style dimension: According to this dimensions, soft news can be distinguished from hard news by the way of presentation. Soft news is presented inter alia in a more emotional, subjective or narrative way. News softening therefore represents a multi-dimensional concept (Esser, 1999; Reinemann et al., 2012) in which the different dimensions and indicators form a continuum. On this basis one can assess the degree of overall news softening. The concept thereby incorporates various other concepts of communication science (e.g., framing, subjective/objective reporting, etc.) that can thus be also attributed to distinct research traditions. Particularly in the style dimension, many different indicators are analysed – although the studies often differ as to which indicators are used. Field of application/theoretical foundation: Since soft news journalism is often seen as a threat to normative standards for quality media, the research on soft news and tabloidization trends is often part of studies on media performance. So far, studies on news softening and tabloidization focus on the comparison of (elite and popular) newspapers (e.g., Lefkowitz, 2018) or (public service and commercial) TV newscasts (e.g., Donsbach & Büttner, 2005). More recent studies also take online media into account (e.g., Karlsson, 2016) or compare social media platforms such as Facebook with offline and/or online media (e.g., Lischka & Werning, 2017; Magin et al., in press). References/combination with other methods of data collection: Content analyses can be combined with survey data from/ interviews with journalists (e.g., Leidenberger, 2015; Lischka & Werning, 2017; Lischka, 2018) or with experiments on the effect of soft news on the audience (e.g., trust in the news, information processing: see Bernhard, 2012 or Grabe et al., 2003 as examples, although these studies do not combine the results on the effects with content analyses). Example studies: Indicator Name of variable(s) Study Topic Dimension: Political relevance Political relevance Reinemann et al., 2012 topic Thema (kategorisiert) [topic (categorized)] Steiner, 2016 Focus Dimension: Episodic framing Episodic – thematic framing Reinemann et al., 2012 Individual framing Individual – societal relevance Reinemann et al., 2012 Style Dimension: 1. Emotional reporting (incl. affective wording, visual presentation of emotions) Emotional – unemotional reporting Reinemann et al., 2012 2. Personal reporting Personal – impersonal reporting Reinemann et al., 2012 3. Colloquial/ loose language Umgangssprache, Lockerheit der Sprache [colloquial, loose language] Steiner, 2016 4. Narrative presentation Nachrichtenpyramide vs. Narration [news pyramid vs. narration] Donsbach & Büttner, 2005 5. Emphasis on conflicts Konflikthaltigkeit [conflicts] Donsbach & Büttner, 2005 Topic Dimension With respect to the topic dimension, soft and hard news can be determined either by the extent to which the political relevance is made clear within the article (e.g., Reinemann et al., 2012) or by the distinction between topics (e.g., Steiner, 2016). Most studies use the latter option with politics (and sometimes economics as well) being considered hard news and topics such as sports and celebrity news being considered soft news. Topic Dimension, Indicator 1: political relevance (Reinemann et al., 2012) Information on Reinemann et al., 2012 Authors: Carsten Reinemann, James Stanyer, Sebastian Scherr, Guido Legnante Research question: This study is a meta-analysis that wants to find out 1) how different studies define news softening and 2) which dimensions and indicators are most often used to measure news softening. As a result, the paper suggests three important dimensions (topic, focus, style) and concrete indicators and operationalizations to measure these dimensions. Object of analysis: 24 studies Info about variable “Four aspects are distinguished that indicate the degree of political relevance of a news item: (1) societal actors, (2) decision-making authorities, (3) policy plan and (4) actors concerned. For each of those aspects the presence (1) or non-presence (0) is coded.” (Reinemann et al. 2012, p. 237) “Two or more societal actors that disagree on a societal issue (e.g., two parties, a party and an NGO, voters and politicians, employers and trade unions). Decision-making authorities (legislative, executive, judiciary) that are or could be involved in the generally binding decision about that societal issue. The substance of a planned or realized decision, measure, programme that relates to the issue. The persons or groups concerned by the planned or realized decisions, measures, programmes.” (Reinemann et al., 2012, p. 237) Variable name: political relevance Level of analysis: article Values: 0) not present; 1) present Level of measurement: nominal Reliability: Variable was not tested within this study. Codebook (in the appendix of the paper, p. 237-238) available under: DOI: 10.1177/1464884911427803 Topic Dimension, Indicator 2: topic (Steiner, 2016) Information on Steiner, 2016 Authors: Miriam Steiner Research question: The study investigates the news softening of German public service and commercial political news on TV and on Facebook. Object of analysis: ARD Tagesschau (TV); ZDF heute (TV); Sat.1 Nachrichten (TV); RTL Aktuell (TV); ARD Tagesschau (Facebook); ZDF heute (Facebook); Sat.1 Nachrichten (Facebook); RTL Aktuell (Facebook) Time frame of analysis: artificial week in 2014 (April, 10 – October, 10) Info about the variable Variable name: Thema (kategorisiert)/ Ressort [Topic (categorized)/ (newspaper) section] Level of analysis: article Values (in German): 101-247) Politik [politics]; 310-399) Wirtschaft [economics] ? defined as “hard news” 900) Unfall/Katastrophe [accident, catastrophe]; 1000-1010) Kriminalität [crime]; 1100) human interest; 1200) Sport [sports] ? defined as “soft news” Level of measurement: nominal Reliability: one coder; intra-coder-reliability: 0.81 (Krippendorff’s Alpha), 83.3% (Holsti) Codebook attached (in German) Focus Dimension According to this dimension, hard and soft news can be distinguished by the framing of the article. Reinemann et al. (2012) hereby differentiate between 1) episodic (soft) vs. thematic (hard) framing and 2) individual (soft) vs. societal (hard) framing. Focus Dimension, Indicator 1: episodic vs. thematic framing (Reinemann et al., 2012: for information about the study, see above) “Here, the focus of a news item as related to the accentuation of episodes or themes is coded. Episodically focused news items present an issue by offering a specific example, case study, or event oriented report, e.g., covering unemployment by presenting a story on the plight of a particular unemployed person […]” (Reinemann et al. 2012, p. 238) Variable name: episodic – thematic framing Level of analysis: article Values: 0) pure or predominant episodic framing; 1) mixed episodic and thematic framing; 2) pure or predominant thematic framing Level of measurement: ordinal Reliability: Variable was not tested within this study. Codebook (in the appendix of the paper, p. 237-238) available under: DOI: 10.1177/1464884911427803 Focus Dimension, Indicator 2: individual vs. societal framing (Reinemann et al., 2012: for information about the study, see above) “Here, the focus of a news item as related to the accentuation of personal or societal relevance is coded. Individually focused news stress [sic!] the personal, private meaning or consequences of the incidents, developments, decisions etc. reported about for members of society. […]” (Reinemann et al. 2012, p. 237) Variable name: individual – societal relevance Level of analysis: article Values: 0) pure or predominant focus on individual relevance/ consequences; 1) mixed attention to individual and societal relevance/ consequences; 2) pure or predominant focus on societal relevance/ consequences Level of measurement: ordinal Reliability: Variable was not tested within this study. Codebook (in the appendix of the paper, p. 237-238) available under: DOI: 10.1177/1464884911427803 Style Dimension This dimension is about how news is presented. Studies thereon analyse different indicators with 1) emotional reporting being most frequently used. Besides, studies refer to 2) personal reporting (i.e., the presence of the journalist’s point of view), colloquial/ loose language, 3) narrative presentation or 4) emphasis on conflicts as indicators of a soft news style. Style Dimension, Indicator 1: emotional reporting Most studies measure emotional reporting with the help of only one variable (usually a multi-level scale) (e.g., Reinemann et al., 2012). Alternatively, one can further distinguish (Magin & Stark, 2015) between verbal style (linguistic features such as strong adjectives and superlatives or emotional metaphors) and visual style (showing emotions in pictures) (e.g., Leidenberger, 2015). Style Dimension, Indicator 1: emotional reporting (Reinemann et al., 2012: for information about the study, see above) “Here, the journalistic style of a news item as related to the emotional presentation of information is coded. […] Emotional news items use verbal, visual or auditive means that potentially arouse or amplify emotions among audience members. This can be done, for example, (a) by dramatizing events, i.e. presenting them as exceptional, exciting, or thrilling; (b) by affective wording and speech, e.g. superlatives, strong adjectives, present tense in the description of past events, pronounced accentuation; (c) by reporting on or visually presenting explicit expressions of emotions (e.g., hurt, anger, fear, distress, joy) […]” (Reinemann et al. 2012, p. 238) Variable name: emotional – unemotional reporting Level of analysis: article Values: 0) purely or predominantly emotional; 1) mix of emotional and unemotional elements; 2) purely or predominantly unemotional Level of measurement: ordinal Reliability: Variable was not tested within this study. Codebook (in the appendix of the paper, p. 237-238) available under: DOI: 10.1177/1464884911427803 Style Dimension, Indicator 2: personal reporting (Reinemann et al., 2012: for information about the study, see above) “Here, the journalistic style of a news item as related to the explicit appearance of journalists’ personal points of view is concerned. It is coded whether a news item includes explicit statements of the reporting [sic!] journalists’ personal impressions, interpretations, points of view or opinions. […]” (Reinemann et al. 2012, p. 238) Variable name: personal – impersonal reporting Level of analysis: article Values: 0) purely or predominantly personal; 1) mix of personal and impersonal elements; 2) purely or predominantly impersonal Level of measurement: ordinal Reliability: Variable was not tested within this study. Codebook (in the appendix of the paper, p. 237-238) available under: DOI: 10.1177/1464884911427803 Style Dimension, Indicator 3: colloquial/ loose language (Steiner, 2016: for information about the study, see above) The variable measures the degree of colloquial language on a 3-point-scale, ranging from 0 (not colloquial at all) to 2 (very colloquial). Variable name: Umgangssprache/ Lockerheit der Sprache [colloquial/ loose language] Level of analysis: article Values: 0) gar nicht umgangssprachlich; 1) wenig umgangssprachlich; 2) stark umgangssprachlich Level of measurement: ordinal Reliability: one coder; intra-coder-reliability: 0.72 (Krippendorff’s Alpha), 88.9% (Holsti, nominal) Codebook attached (in German) Style Dimension, Indicator 4: narrative presentation (Donsbach & Büttner, 2005) Information on Donsbach & Büttner, 2005 Author: Wolfang Donsbach, Katrin Büttner Research question/ Research interest: The study examines the presentation of political news coverage in the most important public service and commercial main German newscasts in 1983, 1990 and 1998 with the aim of revealing changes in the presentation of politics and the extent to which there are convergent trends (? tabloidization). Object of analysis: news on national politics within four German newscasts: 1) Tagesschau (ARD), ZDF heute, Sat.1 Blick/18.30, RTL Aktuell (in 1983: only Tagesschau and ZDF heute) Time frame of analysis: for each year, every second day within the last four weeks before election day was analysed: 1) February 7, 1983 to March 6, 1983 (March 6, 1983 = election day); November 5, 1990 to December 2, 1990 (December 2, 1990 = election day); August 31, 1998 to September 27, 1998 (September 27, 1998 = election day) Info about variable: news pyramid vs. narration This variable is used to measure whether news is presented in terms of the “inverted news pyramid” (that is, answering the important W-questions at the beginning) or whether the journalist tells a story. This variable is measured on a 5-point-scale ranging from -2) (news pyramid) to 2) narration. Variable names: Nachrichtenpyramide vs. Narration [news pyramid vs. narration] Level of analysis: article Values: -2) Nachrichtenpyramide; -1); 0) neither/nor; 1); 2) narration Level of measurement: ordinal Reliability: four coders, reliability: N.A. Codebook (in German) available under: http://donsbach.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Codebuch_TV-Nachrichten.pdf Style Dimension, Indicator 5: emphasis on conflicts (Donsbach & Büttner, 2005: for information about the study, see above) The variable measures whether conflicts are mentioned or not (=9). The variable also distinguishes between implicit (=1; conflict is apparent, but not openly addressed) and explicit (=2; conflict is openly addressed) conflicts. Variable names: Konflikthaltigkeit [conflicts] Level of analysis: article Values: 1) impliziter Konflikt; 2) expliziter Konflikt; 9) kein Konflikt Level of measurement: nominal Reliability: four coders, reliability: N.A. Codebook (in German) available under: http://donsbach.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Codebuch_TV-Nachrichten.pdf References Bernhard, U. (2012). Infotainment in der Zeitung: Der Einfluss unterhaltungsorientierter Gestaltungsmittel auf die Wahrnehmung und Verarbeitung politischer Informationen [Infotainment in the newspaper: The influence of entertainment-oriented style elements on the perception and processing of political information]. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Donsbach, W., & Büttner, K. (2005). Boulevardisierungstrend in deutschen Fernsehnachrichten [Tabloidization trend in German TV news]. Publizistik, 50(1), 21–38. Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58. Esser, F. (1999). `Tabloidization’ of news: A comparative analysis of Anglo-American and German press journalism. European Journal of Communication, 14(3), 291-324. Grabe, M. E., Lang, A., & Zhao, X. (2003). News content and form: Implications for memory and audience evaluations. Communication Research, 30(4), 387-413. Iyengar, S. (1991). Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karlsson, M. B. (2016). Goodbye politics, hello lifestyle. Changing news topics in tabloid, quality and local newspaper websites in the U.K. and Sweden from 2002 to 2012. Observatorio, 10(4), 150-165. Lefkowitz, J. (2018). “Tabloidization” or dual-convergence: Quoted speech in tabloid and “quality” British newspapers 1970–2010. Journalism Studies, 19(3), 353-375. Leidenberger, J. (2015). Boulevardisierung von Fernsehnachrichten: Eine Inhaltsanalyse deutscher und französischer Hauptnachrichtensendungen [Tabloidization of TV news: A content analysis comparing German and French main newscasts]. Wiesbaden: VS. Lischka, J. A. (2018). Logics in social media news making: How social media editors marry the Facebook logic with journalistic standards. Journalism. Advanced online publication. DOI: 10.1177/1464884918788472 Lischka, J. A., & Werning, M. (2017). Wie Facebook den Regionaljournalismus verändert: Publiku*ms- und Algorithmusorientierung bei der Facebook-Themenselektion von Regionalzeitungen [How Facebook alters regional journalism: Audience and algorithm orientation in the Facebook topic selection of regional newspapers]. kommunikation@gesellschaft, 18. Magin, M. (2019). Attention, please! Structural influences on tabloidization of campaign coverage in German and Austrian elite newspapers (1949–2009). Journalism, 20(12), 1704–1724. Magin, M., & Stark, B. (2015). Explaining National Differences of Tabloidisation Between Germany and Austria. Journalism Studies, 16(4), 577–595. Magin, M., Steiner, M., Häuptli, A., Stark, B., & Udris, L. (in press). Is Facebook driving tabloidization? In M. Conboy & S. A. Eldridge II (Eds.), Global Tabloid: Culture and Technology. Routledge. Reinemann, C., Stanyer, J., Scherr, S., & Legnante, G. (2012). Hard and soft news: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings. Journalism, 13(2), 221–239. Steiner, M. (2016). Boulevardisierung goes Facebook? Ein inhaltsanalytischer Vergleich politischer Nachrichten von tagesschau, heute, RTL Aktuell und Sat.1 Nachrichten im Fernsehen und auf Facebook [Tabloidization goes Facebook? A Comparative Content Analysis of the News Quality of Tagesschau, heute, RTL Aktuell und Sat.1 on TV and on Facebook]. In L. Leißner, H. Bause & L. Hagemeyer (Eds.), Politische Kommunikation – neue Phänomene, neue Perspektiven, neue Methoden (pp. 27-46). Berlin: Frank & Timme.

Abstract:

What is game who got game Where's the game In life Behind the game Behind the game I got game She got game We got game They got game He got game -- He Got Game by Public Enemy(From the soundtrack to the 1998 Spike Lee film He Got Game) There is an interesting pattern that develops when a relatively new object of study is broached by cultural studies academics. A reflex response is to defend the reasons why you are giving time to studying these apparently innocuous pastimes. Defenses of television studies twenty-five years ago could have resembled the way that the new forms of games are now being investigated: a preamble of justification -- like an incredibly deep inhalation that has to precede a long-winded exhalation -- would be necessary before launching into the dance of critical analysis. Thankfully our authors have learned and progressed from their forebears at least in this issue (but probably not in every version of game material that you will see flowing outwards in the next few years) and our articles get to the heart of the game, conceptually, analytically and critically. What we're telling you is that this is a remarkable issue that, along with the online re-play conference of 1999, launches the study of games in the contemporary moment of new media game forms and their call and response to previous patterns of play and pastimes. The articles here represent cutting-edge thinking about games and we have, as your humble issue editors, collected those postures and positions in one place. The term pastime to describe playing games has become a bit antiquated, but we'd like to regenerate it here. Our various authors have obviously devoted an incredible number of hours to understanding the games that they describe: contemporary computer games, as much as learning the intricacies of a particular sport, often require an investment of time over weeks and months to achieve sometimes only limited mastery. A pastime has usually been relegated to rainy Saturday afternoons when children (or adults) couldn't work out what do with themselves and were trapped within the confines of the home. To pass the time the old standard board games would appear: from the Victorian Snakes and Ladders to the spirit of proprietorial capitalism of Monopoly; from the war dimensions of Risk and Chess to the mildly headache-producing Scrabble. Passing time could be seen as a description of what childhood has often been about: a transitional reality whose value is always questionable and debatable by others because it is seen as the foundation for the rest of life. Indeed, one element of the moral panic about contemporary computer games is a matter of adults trying to determine whether these games are valuable for their children's future employability in the information economy or a massive waste of time that can never be recovered (Marshall). The pastime, instead of being of peripheral importance has now moved centre-stage in contemporary life through the ubiquity of electronic games and the fact that these games no longer are clearly the province of adolescents but a major cultural reality for a very large population from the ages 5 to 50. The concept of game has similarly migrated, so that most of the authors who have written for this issue have dealt with video and computer games primarily and not with sport or board games or even television game shows, although we have our new and intriguing representative articles from some of these other domains. Several of our authors have been intrigued by how video and computer games have now become metaphors for contemporary life. Certainly recent films have used the game as the new way to deal with the fears and powers of general technological change. In "Flip Horizontal: Gaming as Redemption" José dos Santos Cabral Filho relies on Roger Callois's categories to debate the role of the game in the formation of identity in contemporary culture's continuous debate about the power of technology to determine, and the freedom that technology apparently endows to its users. "The Fortean Continuity of eXistenZ within a Virtual Environment" by Adam Dodd revisits the work of philosopher of the paranormal, Charles Fort, and explores the connections between his ontology of continuity and the movement of signs within a postmodern, virtual, networked environment, analysing Cronenberg's 'game' film eXistenZ and relationships between the body, media, truth and representation. In "Game" Rebecca Farley ponders the concepts of 'game' and 'play' and how these intersect with the values of the society in which games are produced and played, and argues for game theories that recognise the essential element central to all gaming experiences: the player. "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics" by Axel Bruns looks at the shifting aesthetic relationship between words and images in new media as exemplified by the Internet, as a focus for an examination of the influences computer gaming has brought to the Internet, and to computing in general. Our tapestry on the game weaves from this larger conceptual pattern into analytical reflection about the aesthetics and narratives in particular games. In "Odyssey Renewed: Towards a New Aesthetics of Video-Gaming", Jason Wilson identifies the limitations of critical approaches that focus mainly on the screen and on-screen events; he calls for an expanded aesthetics of gaming that recognises the possibilities for "hybrid, cyborg players to narrate performance, play and self" and then analyses how players access this in a variety of games. In "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game", Bernadette Flynn takes us on a guided tour through the virtual worlds of the exploration/adventure games Myst and The Crystal Key via the historic, visual structures of art, architecture and cinema, and examines how these past forms and influences are used to establish representational context, and position, and work to orient and narrate players through the ludic space. In "Computer Games and Narrative Progression", Mark Finn examines the varying degrees of success with which theories from existing media have been applied to computer games, and analyses a variety of console games, specifically using the concepts of narrative progression and subject positioning, showing how these are both enforced by the game and negotiated in the complex relationship between game and player. Computer games are highly diverse in terms of game genre, technology, interactivity and the positioning of the player -- physically, narratively, subjectively and ideologically. While certain analyses may be applied to games in general, some of the best work gets into the particularities of gameplay, success, pleasure and expertise. The two following articles each provide an in-depth analysis of a particular game -- how it is structured, how players interact with the game, and the ideological assumptions that are inherent in the game software. "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD" by Daniel Pargman takes us inside the world of the online adventure MUD (Multi-User Domain) in his analysis of the text-based SvenskMUD, which has been running in Sweden for the last nine years. In "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming" Nick Caldwell examines a real-time strategy (RTS) game, The Settlers, demonstrating how ideological assumptions about culture and production may be actualised in a virtual environment. Our final two articles deal with the fascinating intersection between games and media: how games are used to create media content, and how this repositioning as media spectacle influences and indeed dictates many aspects of the game. In "Technology and Sport" Greg Levine discusses the impact of media broadcast of sporting matches on televised sport through an analysis of Australian Rules football and looks at the broader effects of technological innovation on sport. Carol Morgan examines another meeting of game and media in "Capitalistic Ideology as an 'Interpersonal Game': The Case of Survivor", an analysis of this year's highly popular game show Survivor and the economic and social ideals that are implicit in, and perpetuated by that particular game. Oh, and then there is our final, final submission that you should not miss -- like an extra game level that you haven't discovered yet: this contribution comes from a person who actually failed in his attempt to capture what he wanted to say through an article for submission to the 'game' issue. Jesper Juul, along with 3D graphics by Mads Rydahl, has created a game instead that is designed for your pleasure and for those who have waded through the articles of game theory. It's called "Game Liberation" and its composed of four levels where you as game theorist have to blast away to destroy each theory that tries to colonise games and claim they have worked out their cultural significance. So cool down with a pleasant round of Space Invader-style shoot-em-up after a hard day of facing the faux-titans of media and cultural studies. Experience the zen-zone pleasure of games firsthand without leaving your comfort zone of intellectual gymnastics. We have tried to capture here some of the surface and depth of game culture -- if we can be so bold as to propose a new area of cultural study that is consolidating as a clear and interesting domain of popular culture and intellectual inquiry. As our articles demonstrate game culture does not fit comfortably into past forms of media analysis although there are insights about games that can be teased outwards from their relationship to visual/textual media forms. We invite your comments so that the analytical/critical process initiated by this issue can continue and encourage you to extrapolate outwards through your interventions and contribution on the Media-Culture list associated with M/C. Our authors are thirsty for discussion and debate. Although the issue is not quite like an adventure game, we invite you to point and click and investigate its various threads of game culture. P. David Marshall & Sue Morris -- 'Game' Issue Editors References Marshall, P. David. "Technophobia: Videogames, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics." Media International Australia 85 (1997): 70-8. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris. "Editorial: 'Game'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris, "Editorial: 'Game'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris. (2000) Editorial: 'game'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

I have recently resigned from my casual job at a convenience store where I worked for over five years. During the farewells that took place as I finished my last shift, one of my co-workers asked me if I had any regrets about leaving, and whether there were any fond memories I could recall from the period of my employment. For those of you who have had the somewhat dubious pleasure of working at the lower end of the retail food chain, you'll know that my co-worker could not possibly have been expecting a serious answer to her enquiry. Working in a convenience store is mind-numbing at the best of times, and even if you think you have an iota of intelligence, there are plenty of customers and employers willing to disabuse you of this self-deluding pretension on your part. Despite the facetious quality of my co-worker's question, this article does offer her an answer, but my approach has less to do with memories about the work as such, as it does about the play that went on alongside the work, in order to endure the work. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau speaks of the art of making do as practiced by individuals as they go about their everyday life. He introduces a clear distinction between his understanding of the concepts of 'strategies' and 'tactics'. De Certeau argues that while systems may implement 'strategies' to designate particular activities to specific places, 'tactics' offer innumerable ways to evade or traverse this imposed "law of the place" (29). Tactics are "a clever utilization of time" (39) that take advantage of the opportunities that momentarily present themselves as cracks in the strategies that are enacted by the "surveillance of the proprietary powers" (37). De Certeau illustrates how the mobilisation of tactics is in effect the mobilisation of "ways of using the constraining order of the place" (30) where an individual has little choice but to live and work. In this regard, de Certeau advocates the notion of a creative approach to everyday life, where the individual resorts to artisan-like inventiveness, trickery and "guileful ruse" (37), and thus introduces play into the foundations of power (39), so that she or he may survive the strategies enacted by power. Since for financial reasons I had to work in a convenience store, I always hoped, I admit rather naively, that it would be of the kind that I saw in the movies. I liked the film Grosse Point Blank for a number of reasons. First, for the point in the script where the central character, played by John Cusack, returns to his hometown and attempts to revisit the house he grew up in; in place of his family home he finds a convenience store. Aside from the poetic resonance of this scene with my own life (after five years I began to feel as though I lived at the shop, and even had the front door keys), I envied the guy who worked there -- at least initially, before the shop was turned into a fireball. The convenience store's employee had taken advantage of the absence of an owner or manager to introduce into the workplace an activity usually associated with not-working, with being a customer. He had literally introduced play into the workplace, taking the opportunity to use the shop's video game as his own personal arcade. He was ensconced in a world of his own making, complete with headphones, defiantly oblivious to the customers and the low flying bullets around him. The explicit introduction of play into the workplace is also apparent in Clerks, the film that first highlighted the dissatisfaction of the convenience store employee. In this film, work as a place is transcended in a flagrant example of 'tactics' winning bet on time over place (39), as the employee closes the shop during working hours, and takes to the roof to play a pre-organised game of hockey. Central to the antics of the characters in both films is the absence of power in the form of the owner, or a manager. In my own case, the first four years of working were invariably in the presence of the owner of the store. Given this potentially punitive restraint it was difficult to inject much in the way of overt play into the workplace; however, as soon as the owner was away from the shop, the opportunity to play was seized with both hands. I remember walking into the shop one day, and finding one of my co-workers sitting on one of the benches, formulating questions for another co-worker in anticipation of a quiz game they were going to play, based upon knowledge about the idiosyncrasies of the shop and its customers. A sample question went something like this: What are the names of [insert the name of the bread delivery man here]'s children? For extra points tell me their ages. No doubt the prize was going to be a generous, though unwitting donation from the store's owner. Until the reorganisation of my boss's schedule I had merely wished that I could stand behind the counter and indulge in the leisurely activity of reading the magazines like the employee in Clerks. The opportunities to make use of my employer's time were very fine cracks indeed, so it was true, in accordance with de Certeau, that a particular kind of inventiveness was called for. An example of a creative use of the work place in the face of considerable restraint was the existence of the 'staff lollies' jar. The jar, a re-used plastic confectionery container, appeared one day; someone had gathered all the half-opened packets of lifesavers and chewing gum scattered about under the counter, and labelled them. The effect of the appearance of this container was to sanction the consumption of confectionery that was not paid for, under the ruse that somehow if you didn't either take home, or personally finish the packet of sweets that you had opened, then you weren't stealing them. It was even more okay to finish a packet that someone else had opened, because you couldn't be held remotely responsible. The establishment of a 'staff lollies' jar is not entirely explained by de Certeau's understanding of la perruque, where an employee essentially uses the time and equipment of an employer for her or his own means, without actually stealing goods; that's what reading the New Weekly, then returning it to the magazine rack is about. Having a 'staff lollies' jar is an extension of using "tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the weak on the adversary on his [sic] own turf, hunter's tricks, maneuverable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic and warlike discoveries" (40), which arise in response to a particular rational system. Although when one first begins to work in the type of shop I have been discussing, one is the proverbial kid in a candy store, the conditions of employment are such that it is not acceptable, or even legal, to freely consume the goods. There were however, a variety of refinements of the practice of not-stealing in my former workplace that made it possible to play further, but within the expectations of compliance to legal constraints. Such trickery extended to the trial of new products; how could we respond effectively to customer enquiries about newly arrived products if we hadn't sampled them? In the most subtle manifestation of this ruse, the first aid kit, although ostensibly provided by my employer, was in fact stocked from the shelves by the employees. All in the name of workplace health and safety we provided ourselves with a never-ending supply of nail polish remover, cotton balls, under-arm deodorant and body sprays, tampons, vitamin C and garlic tablets, glucodin energy supplements (like we needed more sugar!), and at any given time, at least three boxes each of the more usual fare of Band-Aids and headache relief capsules. A less subtle and more obviously jubilant manifestation of our ways of using the store's goods resulted in a meandering trail of Australian salamander species -- toys procured from the Kinder surprise-like Yowies -- which were blu-tacked to the inside of a window frame behind the shop's counter in a semi-permanent ligne d'erre: a squiggle of our consumption, our way of using the constraining order of the work place. There are many more examples of play, insofar as that means taking delight in inventiveness, trickery, guile, and ruse, than I can explore within the limits of this article, that the convenience store employee utilises to make do within the framework of subservience in which she or he operates. While I have only dealt with aspects of the employer and employee relationship here, there are certainly many tactics that are employed by the employee to deal with her or his similarly subservient position to the store's customers. For an insight into the dynamics of this relationship Clerks provides an all too brief expose of weird and unreasonable customer behaviour, in response to which the convenience store employee must, at least on the surface, appear to adopt the maxim 'the customer is always right'. Of course, as maxims go, this one is patently not true, but I'll leave it to you to reflect on your own experiences in the convenience store, so that you might ascertain how the person serving you is using tactics. References De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984. Clerks. Dir. Kevin Smith. Artificial Eye: 1994. Grosse Point Blank. Dir. George Armitage. Buena Vista: 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Kirsty Leishman. "At Our Convenience: Working and Playing in the Convenience Store." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/store.php>. Chicago style: Kirsty Leishman, "At Our Convenience: Working and Playing in the Convenience Store," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/store.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Kirsty Leishman. (1998) At our convenience: working and playing in the convenience store. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/store.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

This issue of M/C Journal is devoted to all things cute – Internet animals and stuffed toys, cartoon characters and branded bears. In what follows our nine contributors scrutinise a diverse range of media objects, discussing everything from the economics of Grumpy Cat and the aesthetics of Furbys to Reddit’s intellectual property dramas and the ethics of kitten memes. The articles range across diverse sites, from China to Canada, and equally diverse disciplines, including cultural studies, evolutionary economics, media anthropology, film studies and socio-legal studies. But they share a common aim of tracing out the connections between degraded media forms and wider questions of culture, identity, economy and power. Our contributors tell riveting stories about these connections, inviting us to see the most familiar visual culture in a new way. We are not the first to take cute media seriously as a site of cultural politics, and as an industry in its own right. Cultural theory has a long, antagonistic relationship with the kitsch and the disposable. From the Frankfurt School’s withering critique of cultural commodification to revisionist feminist accounts that emphasise the importance of the everyday, critics have been conducting sporadic incursions into this space for the better part of a century. The rise of cultural studies, a discipline committed to analysing “the scrap of ordinary or banal existence” (Morris and Frow xviii), has naturally provided a convincing intellectual rationale for such research, and has inspired an impressive array of studies on such things as Victorian-era postcards (Milne), Disney films (Forgacs), Hallmark cards (West, Jaffe) and stock photography (Frosh). A parallel strand of literary theory considers the diverse registers of aesthetic experience that characterize cute content (Brown, Harris). Sianne Ngai has written elegantly on this topic, noting that “while the avant-garde is conventionally imagined as sharp and pointy, as hard- or cutting-edge, cute objects have no edge to speak of, usually being soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine” (814). Other scholars trace the historical evolution of cute aesthetics and commodities. Cultural historians have documented the emergence of consumer markets for children and how these have shaped what we think of as cute (Cross). Others have considered the history of domestic animal imagery and its symptomatic relationship with social anxieties around Darwinism, animal rights, and pet keeping (Morse and Danahay, Ritvo). And of course, Japanese popular culture – with its distinctive mobilization of cute aesthetics – has attracted its own rich literature in anthropology and area studies (Allison, Kinsella). The current issue of M/C Journal extends these lines of research while also pushing the conversation in some new directions. Specifically, we are interested in the collision between cute aesthetics, understood as a persistent strand of mass culture, and contemporary digital media. What might the existing tradition of “cute theory” mean in an Internet economy where user-generated content sites and social media have massively expanded the semiotic space of “cute” – and the commercial possibilities this entails? As the heir to a specific mode of degraded populism, the Internet cat video may be to the present what the sitcom, the paperback novel, or the Madonna video was to an earlier moment of cultural analysis. Millions of people worldwide start their days with kittens on Roombas. Global animal brands, such as Maru and Grumpy Cat, are appearing, along with new talent agencies for celebrity pets. Online portal I Can Haz Cheezburger has received millions of dollars in venture capital funding, becoming a diversified media business (and then a dotcom bubble). YouTube channels, Twitter hashtags and blog rolls form an infrastructure across which a vast amount of cute-themed user-generated content, as well as an increasing amount of commercially produced and branded material, now circulates. All this reminds us of the oft-quoted truism that the Internet is “made of kittens”, and that it’s “kittens all the way down”. Digitization of cute culture leads to some unusual tweaks in the taste hierarchies explored in the aforementioned scholarship. Cute content now functions variously as an affective transaction, a form of fandom, and as a subcultural discourse. In some corners of the Internet it is also being re-imagined as something contemporary, self-reflexive and flecked with irony. The example of 4Chan and LOLcats, a jocular, masculinist remix of the feminized genre of pet photography, is particularly striking here. How might the topic of cute look if we moving away from the old dialectics of mass culture critique vs. defense and instead foreground some of these more counter-intuitive aspects, taking seriously the enormous scale and vibrancy of the various “cute” content production systems – from children’s television to greeting cards to CuteOverload.com – and their structural integration into current media, marketing and lifestyle industries? Several articles in this issue adopt this approach, investigating the undergirding economic and regulatory structures of cute culture. Jason Potts provides a novel economic explanation for why there are so many animals on the Internet, using a little-known economic theory (the Alchian-Allen theorem) to explain the abundance of cat videos on YouTube. James Meese explores the complex copyright politics of pet images on Reddit, showing how this online community – which is the original source of much of the Internet’s animal gifs, jpegs and videos – has developed its own procedures for regulating animal image “piracy”. These articles imaginatively connect the soft stuff of cute content with the hard stuff of intellectual property and supply-and-demand dynamics. Another line of questioning investigates the political and bio-political work involved in everyday investments in cute culture. Seen from this perspective, cute is an affect that connects ground-level consumer subjectivity with various economic and political projects. Carolyn Stevens’ essay offers an absorbing analysis of the Japanese cute character Rilakkuma (“Relaxed Bear”), a wildly popular cartoon bear that is typically depicted lying on the couch and eating sweets. She explores what this representation means in the context of a stagnant Japanese economy, when the idea of idleness is taking on a new shade of meaning due to rising under-employment and precarity. Sharalyn Sanders considers a fascinating recent case of cute-powered activism in Canada, when animal rights activists used a multimedia stunt – a cat, Tuxedo Stan, running for mayor of Halifax, Canada – to highlight the unfortunate situation of stray and feral felines in the municipality. Sanders offers a rich analysis of this unusual political campaign and the moral questions it provokes. Elaine Laforteza considers another fascinating collision of the cute and the political: the case of Lil’ Bub, an American cat with a rare genetic condition that results in a perpetually kitten-like facial expression. During 2011 Lil’ Bub became an online phenomenon of the first order. Laforteza uses this event, and the controversies that brewed around it, as an entry point for a fascinating discussion of the “cute-ification” of disability. These case studies remind us once more of the political stakes of representation and viral communication, topics taken up by other contributors in their articles. Radha O’Meara’s “Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? How Cat Videos Disguise Surveillance as Unselfconscious Play” provides a wide-ranging textual analysis of pet videos, focusing on the subtle narrative structures and viewer positioning that are so central to the pleasures of this genre. O’Meara explains how the “cute” experience is linked to the frisson of surveillance, and escape from surveillance. She also explains the aesthetic differences that distinguish online dog videos from cat videos, showing how particular ideas about animals are hardwired into the apparently spontaneous form of amateur content production. Gabriele de Seta investigates the linguistics of cute in his nuanced examination of how a new word – meng – entered popular discourse amongst Mandarin Chinese Internet users. de Seta draws our attention to the specificities of cute as a concept, and how the very notion of cuteness undergoes a series of translations and reconfigurations as it travels across cultures and contexts. As the term meng supplants existing Mandarin terms for cute such as ke’ai, debates around how the new word should be used are common. De Seta shows us how deploying these specific linguistic terms for cuteness involve a range of linguistic and aesthetic judgments. In short, what exactly is cute and in what context? Other contributors offer much-needed cultural analyses of the relationship between cute aesthetics, celebrity and user-generated culture. Catherine Caudwell looks at the once-popular Furby toy brand its treatment in online fan fiction. She notes that these forms of online creative practice offer a range of “imaginative and speculative” critiques of cuteness. Caudwell – like de Seta – reminds us that “cuteness is an unstable aesthetic that is culturally contingent and very much tied to behaviour”, an affect that can encompass friendliness, helplessness, monstrosity and strangeness. Jonathon Hutchinson’s article explores “petworking”, the phenomenon of social media-enabled celebrity pets (and pet owners). Using the famous example of Boo, a “highly networked” celebrity Pomeranian, Hutchinson offers a careful account of how cute is constructed, with intermediaries (owners and, in some cases, agents) negotiating a series of careful interactions between pet fans and the pet itself. Hutchinson argues if we wish to understand the popularity of cute content, the “strategic efforts” of these intermediaries must be taken into account. Each of our contributors has a unique story to tell about the aesthetics of commodity culture. The objects they analyse may be cute and furry, but the critical arguments offered here have very sharp teeth. We hope you enjoy the issue.Acknowledgments Thanks to Axel Bruns at M/C Journal for his support, to our hard-working peer reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments, and to the Swinburne Institute for Social Research for the small grant that made this issue possible. ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Cuteness as Japan’s Millenial Product.” Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. Ed. Joseph Tobin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 34-48. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Forgacs, David. "Disney Animation and the Business of Childhood." Screen 33.4 (1992): 361-374. Frosh, Paul. "Inside the Image Factory: Stock Photography and Cultural Production." Media, Culture & Society 23.5 (2001): 625-646. Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Jaffe, Alexandra. "Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards." Journal of Material Culture 4.2 (1999): 115-141. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan” Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. Ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 220 - 54. Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. New York: Routledge, 2012. Morse, Deborah and Martin Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2007. Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (2005): 811-847. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. West, Emily. "When You Care Enough to Defend the Very Best: How the Greeting Card Industry Manages Cultural Criticism." Media, Culture & Society 29.2 (2007): 241-261.

Abstract:

The release of the Urban issue of M/C a journal of media and culture is particularly timely. This same month, the United Nations General Assembly is hosting the World Urban Forum [http://www.unhabitat.org], designated as an advisory body to support implementation of the Habitat Agenda and to meet the Millennium Development goal of improving living conditions of slum dwellers throughout the globe. Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, promotes the forum by asking us to imagine a world without slums, replaced with productive and inclusive cities that meet the needs of all their citizens, rich and poor alike (Guardian Weekly, 11 April). The focus of the World Urban Forum might serve to remind us that what characterises a particular use of space as urban is not its status as a built environment but the degree to which its habitudes facilitate a lived environment. It is the experience rather than the artefact which constitutes the urban. To put the same point in a rather more banal way, it is not the street but the motion of the pedestrians, commuters upon the street that marks out the trajectories and shapes of urban life. Yet there is also in Tibaijuka's sales pitch for the World Urban Forum a fundamental contradiction that cannot be ignored here. The vision of cities meeting the needs of all citizens seems to invert the ancient logic of civitas, the city appropriate to the needs of its inhabitants, because this vision is blinkered against the economies of scale (and the scale of economics) from which urbanisation proceeds. Rich and poor alike: there is a suggestion here that class or wealth precedes the formulation of needs that a city may be developed to accommodate, as if class structures are not bound up in the lines of demarcation and divisions of space separating the good side of the tracks from the bad. Being able to imagine a world without slums, without resorting to utopian idealisations, requires a realistic acceptance that citizenship and the city emerge togetherthe latter is not built from scratch to meet the needs of a pre-existing citizenry. The urban might indeed be usefully thought of as the site of emergence for both the city and its citizenry, the mode of becoming-civic. Thus, it is important to keep in mind the specificity of the urban experience and to account for this experience, in some sense, on its own terms. Once upon a time, it was fashionable to define the city in opposition to the country. Of course, there is something to be said for this kind of differentiation. A quick drive from Brisbane out through the western suburbs and onwards toward the Darling Downs may remind the traveller of how different from each other the city and the country really are: they look different, they smell different, they seem to function at different rates and on different timescales. Yet we may wonder if the inhabitant of an apartment block in New York ever conceives of her life in terms of its difference from that of the farmer whose agrarian lifestyle she has never encountered. Life in the city is not experienced in terms of something other than city life. Life in the city simply is life in the city. Just as the emphasis on practised and lived space directs our attention to the everyday and the mundane, sites of banality that Benjamin once insisted were crucial sites of political and cultural importance, the attempts of urban theorists to capture the quotidian result in a series of impasses including high/low and theory/practice antinomies. If we are still caught in residual thinking in which, as Lefebvre remarked, a city of nightmares is only countered by a city of dreams, then we are still a far cry away from appreciating the complexities and contradictions of lived and practised urban space. We are even further away from--perhaps too far above--addressing the plight of the slum dweller that the World Urban Forum urges we must. Caught within a theory-practice fold, a desire to plan the utopian quest must always be tempered by a cautious approach. Looking back to modernity's plans and some of the disasters of urban planning, we recognise a continual catapaulting of the urban into the realm of danger and chaos. Importantly, these realms unfold in such a way that they encompass both the level of individual experience and global processes. Indeed, as these words were being written, an explosion in a tower in New York sent shudders through the population: was this another terrorist attack? The types of experiences defining urban life have undergone a major transformation in the last six months, a paradigm shift of sorts, collapsing the range of possible urban experiences into the discourse of terror and the political (and economic) ends it serves. The World Urban Forum represents another way in which the paradigm of the urban is being redefined on a global scale, although the mechanisms of change it institutes will no doubt be more gradual, and we might wonder whether they will be anywhere near as effective. The urban issue Fresh on the heels of the 'fear' issue of M/C, this 'urban' issue again raises the politics of fear. The city is perhaps the prime scene and space of fear. Vocabularies of fear produce and generate the meanings in which the city is lived. It might be politically motivated then to claim the city's deemed disorder as liveable. Indeed, many of the contributions to this issue seem to address issues of representing the urban: how do we mark out this terrain for ourselves. As our feature article by Gerard Goggin suggests, the boundaries of the city are a slippery signifier upon which to place any demarcation of urban experience. Divisions such as city and country, urban and suburban, collapse under the weight of the sprawl of human movements and settlements that might more accurately be represented by the concept of the con-urban. While the boundaries of the city are indeed slippery, one of its common limits has been placed at the sub-urban. In Re-writing Suburbia, Emily Bullock brings that often rejected space to bear on considerations of the urban. Tying the suburban to dreams of home ownership and to dreams of nationness, Bullock finds in Suneeta Peres da Costa's recent novel Homework a textual space that subverts the suburban Australian dream without re-invigorating the urban-suburban binary. The limits of how we define urban life are also tested by the question of scale, between the level of individual experience and global paradigm shifts, for example. One way of working through this issue is suggested by David Prater and Sarah Miller, who focus on the paradox of considering the privatised, physically disengaged human behaviour of internet use undertaken within the public space of the internet cafe. Their analysis of this practice points us towards implications for thinking about notions of the public and private in the contemporary city. Chris McConville also examines the limits of the urban via the relationship between what we might conventionally consider to be urban and that which is urbane. Using a reading of some of the classic private detective figures, McConville demonstrates that in the imaginative realm of popular fiction, a figure such as the detective type provides us with many of the images we use to construct representations of our own cityscapes. The link between imagined and real experiences through the medium of popular fiction also crosses over into class and gender constructions, just as the built environment feeds back into the detective fiction genre as one of its conventional parameters. Perhaps it is only inevitable that the politics of fear and the shaping of what Mike Davis calls defensible space characterises so much of urban living and scheming. Coming from an urban planning background, Simon Bennett theorises Brisbane urban planners' inculcation of safety principles and locates this practice in longstanding imaginative and discursive productions of the urban from a number of quarters. The desire to make safe, Bennett argues, banishes from the city the imaginative spur it might otherwise contain and depletes community networks. The city becomes merely a place to which we commute: unliveable but economically functional. Liveability is also at issue in John Scannell's contribution. In his tracing of the graffiti artist's tracing of the American city, Scannell reveals a reappropriation of urban space by those relegated to the urban squalor and left behind in the great American post-war suburban exodus. But, for the graffiti artist, like the underground dweller, urban decay becomes a site of potential and promise: the city as a liveable and intimately habitable space that the graffiti artist inscribes and practices as her own. Life underground, or below the radar of conventional analysis, also interests our next two contributions. Jason Wilson looks to the often overlooked space of the arcade, likening it to modernity's cinematic and spectator spaces. Finding in the game player another urban fringe dweller, Wilson tracks the liminal spatiality of arcades and its practitioners who, he shows, resist the pastoral longings and projections of the game player to a backstreet urban scene. From a more literal perspective, Marise Williams puts the ethics of de Certeau's down below wandersmänner to work to consider the potential offered for those city dwellers who chose to live, quite literally, underground. In her reading of Colum McCann's This Side of Brightness, Williams suggests that a world without slums might potentially amount to a flattened world without difference. But the difficulty resides in the way these spaces are demarcated and bound up in increasingly calcified class lines that the poststructuralist move towards down below and proclamation of the street--to use an explicitly urban metaphor--might be said to efface in imagining the choice to slum (something one does for kicks) as an option available to all. Aaron Darrell is not interested so much in down below as he is with underneath. As he documents the pivotal cultural and colonising role the museum had maintained in ordering urban space and policies of heritage and history, he questions whose history find its way into Sydney's Hyde Park Barracks Musuem. He then invites us to consider what happens when an unexpected, surfaced over history appears and is reclaimed within the discursive and framing apparatus of the institution. Writing the city as he traverses it, Felix Cheong discusses the imaginative spur the city has long provided poets. In a Poet's Sense of the City, Cheong writes about a city in which life in the city can be nothing but. Lacking the props and boundaries of country and suburban, Singapore as city-state fascinates Cheong's poetic insider, yet distanced, perspective. Using the poet's eye, Linda Neil's Sunflowers complicates postmodern pleasurable choices on offer for the mobile flaneuse in a fictive piece that sweeps our readers along its own Mrs. Dallowayesque promenade of Sydney, art, depression and sunflowers. The role of creativity in shaping the production of urban spaces is central to Nityanand Deckha's article on the Cool Britannia phenomenon. Deckha's analysis of BritSpaceTM demonstrates the ephemeral nature of such productions, yet also suggests that creativity lends to such productions their capacity for re-production. The disparate components of the creative quartercopy, print, art supply and film developing stores, hip cafes and restaurants, galleries, studios, loft conversions and street furniture--combine to form a recognizable and potentially iterative matrix, overlaid on existing spaces. The urban is thus a potentially limitless site for expression, even as the confines of the prevailing discourses attempt to limit its scale. City life has been heralded and promoted recently as the space of sex and freedom, despite the dominance of fear in constructions of the urban. Emma Felton takes this dilemma on board in a review of feminist urban theorists and frames her reading of the safe (but risqué) city locally and personally and wonders what delights the city holds for women in the past and for future generations. Felton's reflection on the changing face of the city for women is crucial especially when the city is still related to female sexuality, a metaphorical tendency Felton reveals in a collection of urban commentators and theorists. Links http://www.unhabitat.org/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Johnson, Laurie and Kulperger, Shelley. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/editorial.php>. Chicago Style Johnson, Laurie and Kulperger, Shelley, "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/editorial.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Johnson, Laurie and Kulperger, Shelley. (2002) Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/editorial.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

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 p*rn 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. Wessell, Adele, and Brien, Donna. “Australian Cookbooks For Young Readers: from Flora Pell to Junior Masterchef.” The International Journal for the Practice and Theories of Writing for Children and Children’s Literature 3.1 (2011): 76–90.

Abstract:

Biopunk is an intriguing development of that essential cultural reference point for the information age: cyberpunk. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) did more than popularise the phrase cyberspace, it laid the basis for a genre that went on to capture the turbulent zeitgeist of a new digital age in which the promises of the much-vaunted, information society finally seemed possible. Karl Marx used the phrase "All that is solid melts into air..."1 to describe the profound social changes wrought by capitalism. It is also a fitting description of the apparent technology-induced paradigm shift in our contemporary perception of the world. Increasingly, solid, material structures are viewed in immaterial, informational terms and the boundaries between previously distinct categories are blurring. This paradigm shift has produced attendant tensions and the significance of biopunk resides in its cultural representation or 'playing out' our contemporary ontological confusion: physicality's newly problematic status. This article briefly samples the work of the British writers Jeff Noon and Michael Marshall Smith to argue that in the rapidly-approaching era of a fully-mapped human genome, biopunk provides a much-needed cathartic imaginative outlet for our growing confusion about the status of the physical in our brave new digital world. Viral Times -- Hybrid Confusion In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles it seems to me have been reversed ... the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. (Ballard 5) The notion that biopunk's imaginative excesses can provide potentially useful insights into the contemporary condition is backed by the sense that the traditional boundary between the real and imagined worlds has become irretrievably blurred. Thus J.G. Ballard suggests that the ubiquity and pervasiveness of modern technology has reversed our usual ontological categories, a sentiment endorsed by Columbus, a character from Noon's novel Pollen, who asserts that "what is presently inside the head will shortly be outside the head. The dream! The dream will live!" (193). The increasing perception of such an ontological reversal is reflected in claims that cyberpunk can be viewed as social theory (Burrows) whereas "Baudrillard's futuristic postmodern social theory can be read in turn as science fiction" (Kellner 299). Cyberpunk fiction utilises the pace of technological change as a permanent narrative back-drop, and having identified various social trends within late capitalism re-presents them with an 'exaggerated clarity' that has become its hallmark. Biopunk takes such exaggerations even further. It metaphorises cyberpunk's social instabilities into an alarming maelstrom of biological uncertainty: exaggerated clarity becomes exaggerated anxiety. Biopunk develops the informationally saturated mise-en-scène of cyberpunk by exploring further the implications of the increasing convergence between information as an abstract entity and its embodied manipulation in biological DNA. It pursues Marx's previously cited image of melting ephemerality with fictional fervour: "These days the doors between the two worlds were slippery, as though the walls were going fluid" (Noon, Pollen 92)2. Biopunk's fictional emphasis upon disorienting levels of fluidity reflects non-fictional concerns about the potential information overloading tendencies of digital technologies: "the tie between information and action has been severed ... we are glutted with information, drowning in information, we have no control over it, don't know what to do with it" (Postman 6). In Pollen, Noon provides a grotesque metaphorical representation of Postman's fears in his portrayal of a near-future Manchester struggling to cope with the after-effects of the widespread dispersal of a powerful fertility drug called Fecundity 10. The city is over-run by exponentially proliferating flora and fauna that combine in a frenetic confusion of unlikely hybrid genetic couplings. Noon uses a blurring of previously distinct genetic categories to symbolise society's inability to control the growth of information. His fiction 'fleshes out' digitally-induced anxieties with a sustained depiction of futuristic Hieronymous Bosch-like febrility and fecundity, or, to use a phrase of Baudrillard's, 'organic delirium': The Zombies were dancing and blooming around the sh*t and the dust, flowers sprouting from their tough skins, petals falling from their mouths. It was a fine show of fauna and flora, all mixed into one being. New species ... It was a time of happenings and flower power. A time of changes. That's why this hayfever wave is exciting me so much, despite the danger. It's got me in two minds, this fever. The flowers are making a come back, and the world is getting messier. The barricades are coming down. This city is so f*cking juicy right now. (Noon, Pollen 117 & 166) Noon's Nymphomation is set in a near-future Manchester that is the testing site for a national lottery based upon a domino-like game. The neologism that provides the novel's title, continues his key theme of fecundity, it is used: ... to denote a complex mathematical procedure where numbers rather than being added together or multiplied or whatever, were actually allowed to breed with each other, to produce new numbers, which had something to do with 'breeding ever more pathways towards the goal'. (Noon, Nymphomation 119) Fecundity in this setting does not only apply to the mating of informational and biological entities but is also apparent in the meme-like transmission of a pervasive copulatory capitalist zeitgeist: "the naked populace, making foreplay to the domiviz, bone-eyed and numberf*cked ... Even the air had a hard-on, bulging with mathematics. Turning the burbflies into a nympho-swarm, liquid streets alive with perverts ..." (Noon, Nymphomation 65) General fecundity is specifically manifested in a glut of commercial activity which the authorities no longer seem able to control: "the streets of Blurbchester were thick with the mergers, a corporate fog of brand images. People had to battle through them ... The Government was at a loss regarding the overwhelming messages; they knew the experiment had gone wrong ... but how to right it?" (240). Informational overload becomes a reproductive frenzy whereby corporate messages breed literally like flies. Gibson's dance of biz becomes an actual buzz: As the burbflies went out of control, blocking out the streetlights, making a cloud of logos. It was rutting season for the living verts, and all over the city the male blurbs were riding on the backs of females. Biting their necks, hoping for babyverts. The city, the pulsating city, alive with the rain and colours and the stench of nymphomation Mathemedia. Here we go, numberf*cked ... (Noon, Nymphomation 159) In the real world, the process of technological change causes flux and confusion. Cyberpunk fiction represents this by describing dystopian social environments. Its protagonists revel in the loss of traditional and coherent social values such as law and order and community where its protagonists revel in an unlimited smorgasboard of privatised formerly public services. Biopunk's distinctive quality stems from its own peculiar perspective on such confusion, manifested in a distinctive attention to bodily substance and a whole bestiary of new hybrid life-forms. Fleshy Contempt For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Gibson, Neuromancer 12) This early passage from Neuromancer describes its protagonist's addictive relationship to the Matrix and provides a neat summary of cyberpunk's perspective on the growing subordination of the physical. Digital pleasure is experienced at the expense of alienation with the material environment. In Douglas Coupland's 'factional' work Microserfs (1995) the excessively manicured lawns at Microsoft headquarters merely represent an epiphenomenon of a more deeply-rooted societal trend towards the diminished importance of our physical sensibilities. Lego, or 'Satan's playtoy', is humorously identified as an emblematic commodity of this tendency due to the way in which it is responsible for brainwashing entire generations of youth from the information-dense industrialized nations into developing mind-sets that view the world as unitized, sterile, inorganic, and interchangeably modular ... Lego is, like, the perfect device to enculturate a citizenry intolerant of smell, intestinal by-products, nonadherence to unified standards, decay, blurred edges, germination and death. Try imagining a forest made of Lego. Good luck. Do you ever see Legos made from ice? dung? wood? iron? and sphagnum moss? No -- grotacious, or what? (Coupland 258) A typically distinguishing feature of biopunk is its willingness to stretch such aspects of the digital zeitgeist to their limits. In contrast to Coupland's easy humour and cyberpunk's "relaxed contempt for the flesh", biopunk refashions sentiments of unease with physical immediacy to take the form of nauseating disgust with the biological per se. In Spares, this is vividly embodied when, for example, objects fall into reality from the cyberspatial Gap: It was a bird, of a kind. A bird or a cat, either way. It was featherless, but stood a foot tall on spindly jointed legs; its face was avian but -- like the body -- fat and dotted with patchy, moulting orange fur. Two vestigial wings poked out of its side at right angles, looking as if they had been unceremoniously amputated with scissors and then re-cauterized. Most of the creature's skin was visible, an unhealthy white mess that appeared to be weeping fluid. The whole body heaved in and out as it sat, as if labouring for breath, and it gave of a smell of recent decay -- as if fresh-minted for death ... its beak opened. The hole this revealed looked less like a mouth than a churned wound, and the eyes, though vicious, were faltering ... The bird tried to take a step towards us, but the effort caused one of its legs to break. The top joint teetered in its socket and then popped out. The creature flopped onto its side. The skin over the joint tore like an over-ripe fruit, releasing a gout of matter that resembled nothing so much as a heavy period mixed with sour cream. (Smith 162) Biopunk's almost neo-gnostic distaste for flesh has arguably become increasingly apparent in William Gibson's later work. In Neuromancer, for example, the tone of 'relaxed contempt' is still evident in his description of the population's consumer demand: "Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification" (60). However, his vision is certainly less relaxed when, by the time of Idoru (1996), he describes how the media's audience ... is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the annointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth ... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections. (28-9) Conclusion Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. (McLuhan 12) McLuhan's image of the dramatic visibility of sound right at the moment of its imminent supercedance is a useful way of conceptualising the significance of biopunk and its obsessive highlighting of bodies and their metaphoric power. Perhaps as we leap-frog the mechanical technologies of modernity into a postindustrial world where information attains the status of the fourth element, biopunk is performing an idiosyncratic eulogy at the funeral of physicality. Footnotes Marshall Berman uses this phrase for the title of his historical, socio-cultural exploration of capitalism and its effects. Further examples include: ... the world is getting very fluid these days. Very fluid. Dangerously so (Noon, Pollen 101) ... It was a fluid world and there was danger for everybody living there. (157) ... the real world is up for grabs, especially since the world has become so fluid. (200) ... Even time was becoming fluid under the new map (246) ... Coyote is howling now, turning the road into liquid so he can glide down its throat. (254) The world was dissolving and the new day bled away ... safety, the rules, cartography, instruction ... all the bad things were peeling away (278) References Ballard, J.G. Crash. London: Vintage, 1995. Berman, M. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso, 1983. Burrows, R. "Cyberpunk as Social Theory." Imagining Cities. Eds. S. Westwood and J. Williams. London: Routledge, 1997. Coupland, D. Microserfs. London: Flamingo, 1995. Gibson, W. Neuromancer. London: Grafton, 1984. ---. Idoru. London:Viking, 1996. Kellner, D. Media Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. McLuhan, M. Understanding Media. New York: New American Library, 1964. Noon, Jeff. Vurt. Manchester: Ringpull, 1993. ---. Pollen. Manchester: Ringpull, 1995. ---. Nymphomation, London: Corgi, 1997. Postman, N. "Informing Ourselves to Death." German Informatics Society, Stuttgart. 1990. 26 June 2000 <http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Criticisms/informing_ourselves_to_death.paper>. Smith, M. M. Spares. London: HarperCollins, 1996. Stephenson, N. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Taylor. "Fleshing Out the Maelstrom: Biopunk and the Violence of Information." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php>. Chicago style: Paul Taylor, "Fleshing Out the Maelstrom: Biopunk and the Violence of Information," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Taylor. (2000) Fleshing Out the Maelstrom: Biopunk and the Violence of Information. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

If we consider learning as a meaning-making process where people construct shared knowledge, it becomes a social dialogical activity in which knowledge is the result of an active process of articulation and reflection within a context (Jonassen et al.). An important element of this belief is that conversation is at the core of learning because knowledge is language-mediated. Within this context, what makes a conversation worthwhile and meaningful is how it is structured, how it is managed by the participants, and most importantly, how it is understood. In particular, conversation is essential in learning situations where the main goal is to generate a new understanding of the world (Bruner). Thus, if conversations can be seen as support for learning processes, the question then becomes how synchronous textual spaces mediate conversation and how chat affects learning. Experienced Teachers Learning in a Collaborative Virtual Environment We studied two different groups of experienced teachers from Kindergarten to Grade 12 (K-12) attending a Master of Education course entitled "Curriculum and Instruction". They communicated through a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) designed to enhance teachers' professional development: TAPPED IN™ (TI). We recorded their on-line conversations over six weeks. The teachers met twice a week for a two hour session and the data collected consisted of approximately 350-400 pages of text from transcripts. The following concerns, gleaned from an ongoing analysis of on-line conversations are of interest for this paper: The first concern has to do with the ability of teachers to concentrate on a task while managing multiple simultaneous conversations. The question is how to maintain the focus on the purpose of the goal oriented task. The second concern is related to the technical characteristics of a CVE and the teachers' feelings of being lost, too slow, or not understanding the point of the discussion. The question is how to deal with this confusion when the aim is to construct meanings from online discussion? The third concern is related the preceding points. It is concerned with the importance of a leader coaching and guiding experienced teachers online. We examined these three concerns, using TI during the teachers' on line discussions. Our primary goal in the analysis was to determine i) whether the teachers could conduct their learning activities through TI and ii) how goal-oriented conversations might be affected by the constraints of TI. The following examples come from a personal recorder. Messages are numbered in order to show their position in the session and to show the distance between the messages sent. Implications of Multitasking in Learning Sessions In CVEs, participants have the possibility of performing several tasks simultaneously (Holmevik). This is especially true when participants hold more than one conversation at a time. Participants can talk to one person or to the whole group while also chatting privately with people in the same CVE's room, in the same CVE or even in other CVEs. But the possibility of being able to participate in multiple conversations becomes potentially confusing and disorienting for teachers wanting to achieve a specific task. Let us give an example of how a main task (e.g. to share notes of pedagogical projects -- task 1) fragments into different tasks (e.g. learning a command -- how to create a note -- task 2; and socialise, express feelings and play with cows -- task 3). (Note that the students are in fact experienced teachers and a teacher is leading the session. The goal of the on-line session is to read and discuss the different educational projects that the students should have written in virtual notes.) The goal of the task became difficult to accomplish for teachers who were suddenly involved in more than one task at a time. In order to understand what is going on in this situation, participants had to accomplish extra work. They needed to filter messages and rank them to make the main objective of the session clear. In a goal-oriented session such as this, it is extremely important to keep track of the task as well as to concentrate on one activity at time. This entails a necessity to understand current threads in order to contribute to the object of interest for them as individuals and as a group member. Implications of Multi Threads and Floor-Taking in Goal-Oriented Conversations Perseverance with each message creates a parallelism that can become extremely disorienting to participants who intend to produce new understandings and not just maintain an awareness during on-line conversations. The larger the number of participants in a conversation, the more likely it is for fragmentation to occur. The jumbled and quickly scrolling screen can be quite disconcerting. Yet as mentioned by Mynatt et al., even between two participants, multi-threading is common due to the overlapping composition of conversational turns. Participants write simultaneously and the host computer sends the messages out sequentially. Under these conditions, competing conversational threads emerge continuously. It becomes difficult to know who actually holds the floor at the time. Here is an example showing a teacher -- student 2 -- looking for attention and trying to read and understand others' answers to his questions: Student 2 did not read message 26 sent from the teacher with care. In fact, the teacher did explain that there is a part in the assignment where students have to meet in order to exchange ideas about individual projects. Yet although S2's question was answered, S2 still did not understand. A possible reason is that S2 could have been focussed on writing the next question. Again, the teacher answered the question asked in message 29. However, S2 still did not understand in spite of S15 and S6 confirming that the teacher had already covered the question. Student 2 finally understood when the teacher addressed him directly and repeated what the other students had said before. In order to be heard, the students repeated their questions until they had the answer from the teacher. With more than a handful of participants, this attention seeking strategy may make on-line conversations confusing. Goal-oriented conversations then easily degenerate, as mentioned by Colomb and Simutis. These authors point out that one of the most common problems in using CMC is keeping students on task. Even experienced teachers do not escape from the possibility of converting from an instrumental discussion to a social one due to different misunderstanding between interlocutors. To be able to 'send' a message is not equivalent to claiming the 'floor'. An important extra task that teachers have to do in CVEs before sending a message is to think about how it meets the goal of the discussion. Looking for coherence and understanding is a must in learning situations and this becomes a great challenge in online learning sessions. On the other hand, different modalities of communication in CVEs may add richness and depth to online conversations when participants can anticipate constraints. Consider another group of teachers. They are discussing readings, and make great use of multiple modalities, such as gestures, to reframe misunderstandings. These gestures provide back channel information and other visual signs. Here is one example of what a group of teachers does in order to avoid embarrassing situations. As Mynatt et al. express, "the availability of multiple modalities gives complexity to the interactional rhythm, because people have choices about what modality to use at any particular moment and for any set of conversation partners" (138). Given these pros and cons of CVEs, the challenge of holding an on-line educational discussion requires the teachers to reestablish the context and control the underlying the sense of the conversation. This challenge could be also regarded as an exigency of the medium that 'invites' teachers to structure their conversations in order to encourage meaningful discussions. Importance of a Teacher of Teachers The problems mentioned earlier may be solved more easily when there is a leader at hand. Since these difficulties mainly arise at the start of learning the communication environment, it might be proposed that a leader is most critical in this phase. A comparison of two groups' interactions with and without a leader supports the intuition that a leader is crucial for keeping the learning on track even though the participants are experienced teachers. In this example, the task that the group performed was the same: "learning to attach an icon to their ellipses representing their presence in the system". Table 1. Data related to groups with and without a teacher Groups Learners Icons attached Messages produced Time employed 1. Without leader 12 0 549 56 min 8 sec 2. With leader 9 4 644 1h 27min 52 sec Fig. 1 Comparing flow and categories of the messages sent by the groups These frequencies confirm that teachers without a leader have more problems than the group with a leader. The number of successful icons attached by the groups (0 and 4 icons) demonstrates this claim. What happens is that the number of messages related to 'Task' decrease and those related to 'Relation' increase when there is no leader present -- a result which would be unsurprising among most people who have worked in 'real' classrooms. Messages produced and coded as 'Playing' and 'Feedback' also show a considerable difference between groups. Finally, categories such as 'Whisper' and 'Artifact' present in comparison to the others minimal differences between groups. A leader is a must for the smooth development of on-line conversation. The leader is a sort of mediator between the pedagogical task of the on-line conversation and what appears on the screen. The leader's task is to show which threads are important to follow or not and how messages should be read on the screen. Like an orchestra conductor, the leader coordinates tasks and makes sense of individual actions which are part of a common product and the quality of the on-going conversation. Discussion This ongoing research has demonstrated three important concerns surrounding experienced teachers' professional use of CVE. First, teachers chatting online have to anticipate the lack of assurance "that what gets sent gets read" and that gaining the floor in a CVE is "that one's message draws a response and in some way affect the direction of a current thread" (Colomb and Simutis). Teachers have to learn to negotiate turn-taking sequences behind the screen. When chatting, a person's intention to speak is not signalled. Overlapping and interruptions do not exist and non-verbal communication requires knowledge of gesture commands. Negotiating turns in online conversations is concerned with how people express information and what they express. In educational discussion, turns are generally taken when messages either present a good formulation of ideas, express controversial thinking, raise an issue that allows someone else to participate, or provide knowledge on the topic at hand. Second, teachers should learn to collaborate in online conversations. It is essential to be aware that people are writing a text while they discuss. The quality of the conversation will depend on one hand, how teachers manage the discussion and, on the other hand, the opinions they elaborate together. Third, teachers need leaders in online discussions. A leader has to be able to anticipate the text that the participants are writing. The leader has the responsibility of meeting pedagogical goals with a participant's messages. The leader has to show the coherence or incoherence of the discussion and raise issues that improve the level of the written interaction. These issues are extremely important in a context where people learn through conversations. As Laurillard has mentioned, "academic knowledge relies heavily on symbolic representation as the medium through which it is known. ... Students have to learn to handle the representations system as well as the ideas they represent" (27). Therefore, it is necessary that learners know and think about the rules of online discussion in order to adapt technical commands and effects to their needs. But these rules are in contrast to what participants expect from online conversations. Teachers want to perform their tasks with support of a computer program; they do not want to learn the computer program per se. CMC in learning activities must be based, not on visionary claims about technology as an all-purpose tool for automatic teaching/learning, but on specific accounts of how and why the technology affects the user's achievement of specific goals. Acknowledgements This study has been supported by a grant from the Swedish Transport & Communication Research Board. We wish to express our gratitude to Judi Fusco, who, in several ways, has been a bridge between the TI community and us. We also want to thank the teachers, CharlesE and FlorenceE, for having the courage of letting Tessy 'sit in' on the sessions. The 'expert' session was lead by TerryG, whom we also want to thank for her generosity. Susan Wildermuth came to us in the final spurt, and we owe her much for the reliability check, structuring of ideas, and hints about related research. Finally, all students struggling with TI are thanked for their willingness to participate in this study. References Cherny, L. Conversation and Community. Chat in a Virtual World. California: CSCLI Ed, 1999. Colomb, and Simutis. "Visible Conversations and Academic Inquiry: CMC in a Culturally Diverse Classroom." Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Susan Herring. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. 203-24. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meanings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. Holmevik, J., and C. Haynes. MOOniversity. A Student's Guide to Online Learning Environments. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. Jonassen, D., et al. "Constructivism and Computer-Mediated Communication." Distance Education 9.2 (1992): 7-25. Laurrillard, Diana. Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology. London: Routledge, 1994. Mynatt, E. D., et al. "Network Communities: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed." Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing 7.1-2 (1998): 123-56. Schlager, M., J. Fusco, and P. Schank. "Evolution of an On-line Education Community of Practice." Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace. Ed. K. Ann Renninger and W. Shumar. NY: Cambridge UP, 2000. Wærn, Yvonne. "Absent Minds -- On Teacher Professional Development." Journal of Courseware Studies 22 (1999): 441-55. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Teresa Cerratto, Yvonne Wærn. "Chatting to Learn and Learning to Chat in Collaborative Virtual Environments." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/learning.php>. Chicago style: Teresa Cerratto, Yvonne Wærn, "Chatting to Learn and Learning to Chat in Collaborative Virtual Environments," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/learning.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Teresa Cerratto, Yvonne Wærn. (2000) Chatting to learn and learning to chat in collaborative virtual environments. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/learning.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Mobile In many countries, more people have mobile phones than they do fixed-line phones. Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing technologies ever, outstripping even the internet in many respects. With the advent and widespread deployment of digital systems, mobile phones were used by an estimated 1, 158, 254, 300 people worldwide in 2002 (up from approximately 91 million in 1995), 51. 4% of total telephone subscribers (ITU). One of the reasons for this is mobility itself: the ability for people to talk on the phone wherever they are. The communicative possibilities opened up by mobile phones have produced new uses and new discourses (see Katz and Aakhus; Brown, Green, and Harper; and Plant). Contemporary soundscapes now feature not only voice calls in previously quiet public spaces such as buses or restaurants but also the aural irruptions of customised polyphonic ringtones identifying whose phone is ringing by the tune downloaded. The mobile phone plays an important role in contemporary visual and material culture as fashion item and status symbol. Most tragically one might point to the tableau of people in the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, or aboard a plane about to crash, calling their loved ones to say good-bye (Galvin). By contrast, one can look on at the bathos of Australian cricketer Shane Warne’s predilection for pressing his mobile phone into service to arrange wanted and unwanted assignations while on tour. In this article, I wish to consider another important and so far also under-theorised aspect of mobile phones: text. Of contemporary textual and semiotic systems, mobile text is only a recent addition. Yet it is already produces millions of inscriptions each day, and promises to be of far-reaching significance. Txt Txt msg ws an acidnt. no 1 expcted it. Whn the 1st txt msg ws sent, in 1993 by Nokia eng stdnt Riku Pihkonen, the telcom cpnies thought it ws nt important. SMS – Short Message Service – ws nt considrd a majr pt of GSM. Like mny teks, the *pwr* of txt — indeed, the *pwr* of the fon — wz discvrd by users. In the case of txt mssng, the usrs were the yng or poor in the W and E. (Agar 105) As Jon Agar suggests in Constant Touch, textual communication through mobile phone was an after-thought. Mobile phones use radio waves, operating on a cellular system. The first such mobile service went live in Chicago in December 1978, in Sweden in 1981, in January 1985 in the United Kingdom (Agar), and in the mid-1980s in Australia. Mobile cellular systems allowed efficient sharing of scarce spectrum, improvements in handsets and quality, drawing on advances in science and engineering. In the first instance, technology designers, manufacturers, and mobile phone companies had been preoccupied with transferring telephone capabilities and culture to the mobile phone platform. With the growth in data communications from the 1960s onwards, consideration had been given to data capabilities of mobile phone. One difficulty, however, had been the poor quality and slow transfer rates of data communications over mobile networks, especially with first-generation analogue and early second-generation digital mobile phones. As the internet was widely and wildly adopted in the early to mid-1990s, mobile phone proponents looked at mimicking internet and online data services possibilities on their hand-held devices. What could work on a computer screen, it was thought, could be reinvented in miniature for the mobile phone — and hence much money was invested into the wireless access protocol (or WAP), which spectacularly flopped. The future of mobiles as a material support for text culture was not to lie, at first at least, in aping the world-wide web for the phone. It came from an unexpected direction: cheap, simple letters, spelling out short messages with strange new ellipses. SMS was built into the European Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard as an insignificant, additional capability. A number of telecommunications manufacturers thought so little of the SMS as not to not design or even offer the equipment needed (the servers, for instance) for the distribution of the messages. The character sets were limited, the keyboards small, the typeface displays rudimentary, and there was no acknowledgement that messages were actually received by the recipient. Yet SMS was cheap, and it offered one-to-one, or one-to-many, text communications that could be read at leisure, or more often, immediately. SMS was avidly taken up by young people, forming a new culture of media use. Sending a text message offered a relatively cheap and affordable alternative to the still expensive timed calls of voice mobile. In its early beginnings, mobile text can be seen as a subcultural activity. The text culture featured compressed, cryptic messages, with users devising their own abbreviations and grammar. One of the reasons young people took to texting was a tactic of consolidating and shaping their own shared culture, in distinction from the general culture dominated by their parents and other adults. Mobile texting become involved in a wider reworking of youth culture, involving other new media forms and technologies, and cultural developments (Butcher and Thomas). Another subculture that also was in the vanguard of SMS was the Deaf ‘community’. Though the Alexander Graham Bell, celebrated as the inventor of the telephone, very much had his hearing-impaired wife in mind in devising a new form of communication, Deaf people have been systematically left off the telecommunications network since this time. Deaf people pioneered an earlier form of text communications based on the Baudot standard, used for telex communications. Known as teletypewriter (TTY), or telecommunications device for the Deaf (TDD) in the US, this technology allowed Deaf people to communicate with each other by connecting such devices to the phone network. The addition of a relay service (established in Australia in the mid-1990s after much government resistance) allows Deaf people to communicate with hearing people without TTYs (Goggin & Newell). Connecting TTYs to mobile phones have been a vexed issue, however, because the digital phone network in Australia does not allow compatibility. For this reason, and because of other features, Deaf people have become avid users of SMS (Harper). An especially favoured device in Europe has been the Nokia Communicator, with its hinged keyboard. The move from a ‘restricted’, ‘subcultural’ economy to a ‘general’ economy sees mobile texting become incorporated in the semiotic texture and prosaic practices of everyday life. Many users were already familiar with the new conventions already developed around electronic mail, with shorter, crisper messages sent and received — more conversation-like than other correspondence. Unlike phone calls, email is asynchronous. The sender can respond immediately, and the reply will be received with seconds. However, they can also choose to reply at their leisure. Similarly, for the adept user, SMS offers considerable advantages over voice communications, because it makes textual production mobile. Writing and reading can take place wherever a mobile phone can be turned on: in the street, on the train, in the club, in the lecture theatre, in bed. The body writes differently too. Writing with a pen takes a finger and thumb. Typing on a keyboard requires between two and ten fingers. The mobile phone uses the ‘fifth finger’ — the thumb. Always too early, and too late, to speculate on contemporary culture (Morris), it is worth analyzing the textuality of mobile text. Theorists of media, especially television, have insisted on understanding the specific textual modes of different cultural forms. We are familiar with this imperative, and other methods of making visible and decentring structures of text, and the institutions which animate and frame them (whether author or producer; reader or audience; the cultural expectations encoded in genre; the inscriptions in technology). In formal terms, mobile text can be described as involving elision, great compression, and open-endedness. Its channels of communication physically constrain the composition of a very long single text message. Imagine sending James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in one text message. How long would it take to key in this exemplar of the disintegration of the cultural form of the novel? How long would it take to read? How would one navigate the text? Imagine sending the Courier-Mail or Financial Review newspaper over a series of text messages? The concept of the ‘news’, with all its cultural baggage, is being reconfigured by mobile text — more along the lines of the older technology of the telegraph, perhaps: a few words suffices to signify what is important. Mobile textuality, then, involves a radical fragmentation and unpredictable seriality of text lexia (Barthes). Sometimes a mobile text looks singular: saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or sending your name and ID number to obtain your high school or university results. Yet, like a telephone conversation, or any text perhaps, its structure is always predicated upon, and haunted by, the other. Its imagined reader always has a mobile phone too, little time, no fixed address (except that hailed by the network’s radio transmitter), and a finger poised to respond. Mobile text has structure and channels. Yet, like all text, our reading and writing of it reworks those fixities and makes destabilizes our ‘clear’ communication. After all, mobile textuality has a set of new pre-conditions and fragilities. It introduces new sorts of ‘noise’ to signal problems to annoy those theorists cleaving to the Shannon and Weaver linear model of communication; signals often drop out; there is a network confirmation (and message displayed) that text messages have been sent, but no system guarantee that they have been received. Our friend or service provider might text us back, but how do we know that they got our text message? Commodity We are familiar now with the pleasures of mobile text, the smile of alerting a friend to our arrival, celebrating good news, jilting a lover, making a threat, firing a worker, flirting and picking-up. Text culture has a new vector of mobility, invented by its users, but now coveted and commodified by businesses who did not see it coming in the first place. Nimble in its keystrokes, rich in expressivity and cultural invention, but relatively rudimentary in its technical characteristics, mobile text culture has finally registered in the boardrooms of communications companies. Not only is SMS the preferred medium of mobile phone users to keep in touch with each other, SMS has insinuated itself into previously separate communication industries arenas. In 2002-2003 SMS became firmly established in television broadcasting. Finally, interactive television had arrived after many years of prototyping and being heralded. The keenly awaited back-channel for television arrives courtesy not of cable or satellite television, nor an extra fixed-phone line. It’s the mobile phone, stupid! Big Brother was not only a watershed in reality television, but also in convergent media. Less obvious perhaps than supplementary viewing, or biographies, or chat on Big Brother websites around the world was the use of SMS for voting. SMS is now routinely used by mainstream television channels for viewer feedback, contest entry, and program information. As well as its widespread deployment in broadcasting, mobile text culture has been the language of prosaic, everyday transactions. Slipping into a café at Bronte Beach in Sydney, why not pay your parking meter via SMS? You’ll even receive a warning when your time is up. The mobile is becoming the ‘electronic purse’, with SMS providing its syntax and sentences. The belated ingenuity of those fascinated by the economics of mobile text has also coincided with a technological reworking of its possibilities, with new implications for its semiotic possibilities. Multimedia messaging (MMS) has now been deployed, on capable digital phones (an instance of what has been called 2.5 generation [G] digital phones) and third-generation networks. MMS allows images, video, and audio to be communicated. At one level, this sort of capability can be user-generated, as in the popularity of mobiles that take pictures and send these to other users. Television broadcasters are also interested in the capability to send video clips of favourite programs to viewers. Not content with the revenues raised from millions of standard-priced SMS, and now MMS transactions, commercial participants along the value chain are keenly awaiting the deployment of what is called ‘premium rate’ SMS and MMS services. These services will involve the delivery of desirable content via SMS and MMS, and be priced at a premium. Products and services are likely to include: one-to-one textchat; subscription services (content delivered on handset); multi-party text chat (such as chat rooms); adult entertainment services; multi-part messages (such as text communications plus downloads); download of video or ringtones. In August 2003, one text-chat service charged $4.40 for a pair of SMS. Pwr At the end of 2003, we have scarcely registered the textual practices and systems in mobile text, a culture that sprang up in the interstices of telecommunications. It may be urgent that we do think about the stakes here, as SMS is being extended and commodified. There are obvious and serious policy issues in premium rate SMS and MMS services, and questions concerning the political economy in which these are embedded. Yet there are cultural questions too, with intricate ramifications. How do we understand the effects of mobile textuality, rewriting the telephone book for this new cultural form (Ronell). What are the new genres emerging? And what are the implications for cultural practice and policy? Does it matter, for instance, that new MMS and 3rd generation mobile platforms are not being designed or offered with any-to-any capabilities in mind: allowing any user to upload and send multimedia communications to other any. True, as the example of SMS shows, the inventiveness of users is difficult to foresee and predict, and so new forms of mobile text may have all sorts of relationships with content and communication. However, there are worrying signs of these developing mobile circuits being programmed for narrow channels of retail purchase of cultural products rather than open-source, open-architecture, publicly usable nodes of connection. Works Cited Agar, Jon. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. Cambridge: Icon, 2003. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. Brown, Barry, Green, Nicola, and Harper, Richard, eds. Wireless World: Social, Cultural, and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age. London: Springer Verlag, 2001. Butcher, Melissa, and Thomas, Mandy, eds. Ingenious: Emerging youth cultures in urban Australia. Melbourne: Pluto, 2003. Galvin, Michael. ‘September 11 and the Logistics of Communication.’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17.3 (2003): 303-13. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Digital in New Media. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Harper, Phil. ‘Networking the Deaf Nation.’ Australian Journal of Communication 30. 3 (2003), in press. International Telecommunications Union (ITU). ‘Mobile Cellular, subscribers per 100 people.’ World Telecommunication Indicators <http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/> accessed 13 October 2003. Katz, James E., and Aakhus, Mark, eds. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2002. Morris, Meaghan. Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: U of Indiana P, 1998. Plant, Sadie. On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life. < http://www.motorola.com/mot/documents/0,1028,296,00.pdf> accessed 5 October 2003. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology—schizophrenia—electric speech. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "‘mobile text’" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2004, Jan 12). ‘mobile text’. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>

Abstract:

1909–22: Turkey exterminated over 1.5 million of its ethnically Armenian, and hundreds of thousands of its ethnically Greek and Assyrian, citizens. Most died in 1915. This period of decimation in now widely called the Armenian Genocide (Balakian 179-80).1910: Siamanto first published his poem, The Dance: “The corpses were piled as trees, / and from the springs, from the streams and the road, / the blood was a stubborn murmur.” When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when “everything that could happen has already happened,” then time is nothing: “there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language” (Nichanian 142).2007: In my novel The Edge of the World a ceramic bowl, luminous blue, recurs as motif. Imagine you are tiny: the bowl is broken but you don’t remember breaking it. You’re awash with tears. You sit on the floor, gather shards but, no matter how you try, you can’t fix it. Imagine, now, that the bowl is the sky, huge and upturned above your head. You have always known, through every wash of your blood, that life is shockingly precarious. Silence—between heartbeats, between the words your parents speak—tells you: something inside you is terribly wrong; home is not home but there is no other home; you “can never be fully grounded in a community which does not share or empathise with the experience of persecution” (Wajnryb 130). This is the stubborn murmur of your body.Because time is nothing, this essay is fragmented, non-linear. Its main characters: my mother, grandmother (Hovsanna), grandfather (Benyamin), some of my mother’s older siblings (Krikor, Maree, Hovsep, Arusiak), and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Ottoman military officer, Young Turk leader, first president of Turkey). 1915–2013: Turkey invests much energy in genocide denial, minimisation and deflection of responsibility. 24 April 2012: Barack Obama refers to the Medz Yeghern (Great Calamity). The use of this term is decried as appeasem*nt, privileging political alliance with Turkey over human rights. 2003: Between Genocide and Catastrophe, letters between Armenian-American theorist David Kazanjian and Armenian-French theorist Marc Nichanian, contest the naming of the “event” (126). Nichanian says those who call it the Genocide are:repeating every day, everywhere, in all places, the original denial of the Catastrophe. But this is part of the catastrophic structure of the survivor. By using the word “Genocide”, we survivors are only repeating […] the denial of the loss. We probably cannot help it. We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do […] we claim all over the world that we have been “genocided;” we relentlessly need to prove our own death. We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner. (127)1992: In Revolution and Genocide, historian Robert Melson identifies the Armenian Genocide as “total” because it was public policy intended to exterminate a large fraction of Armenian society, “including the families of its members, and the destruction of its social and cultural identity in most or all aspects” (26).1986: Boyajian and Grigorian assert that the Genocide “is still operative” because, without full acknowledgement, “the ghosts won’t go away” (qtd. in Hovannisian 183). They rise up from earth, silence, water, dreams: Armenian literature, Armenian homes haunted by them. 2013: My heart pounds: Medz Yeghern, Aksor (Exile), Anashmaneli (Indefinable), Darakrutiun (Deportation), Chart (Massacre), Brnagaght (Forced migration), Aghed (Catastrophe), Genocide. I am awash. Time is nothing.1909–15: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was both a serving Ottoman officer and a leader of the revolutionary Young Turks. He led Ottoman troops in the repulsion of the Allied invasion before dawn on 25 April at Gallipoli and other sites. Many troops died in a series of battles that eventually saw the Ottomans triumph. Out of this was born one of Australia’s founding myths: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), courageous in the face of certain defeat. They are commemorated yearly on 25 April, ANZAC Day. To question this myth is to risk being labelled traitor.1919–23: Ataturk began a nationalist revolution against the occupying Allies, the nascent neighbouring Republic of Armenia, and others. The Allies withdrew two years later. Ataturk was installed as unofficial leader, becoming President in 1923. 1920–1922: The last waves of the Genocide. 2007: Robert Manne published A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide, calling for a recontextualisation of the cultural view of the Gallipoli landings in light of the concurrence of the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place just over the rise, had been witnessed by many military personnel and widely reported by international media at the time. Armenian networks across Australia were abuzz. There were media discussions. I listened, stared out of my office window at the horizon, imagined Armenian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Did they feel like me—like they were holding their breath?Then it all went quiet. Manne wrote: “It is a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.” 1992: I bought an old house to make a home for me and my two small children. The rooms were large, the ceilings high, and behind it was a jacaranda with a sturdy tree house built high up in its fork. One of my mother’s Armenian friends kindly offered to help with repairs. He and my mother would spend Saturdays with us, working, looking after the kids. Mum would stay the night; her friend would go home. But one night he took a sleeping bag up the ladder to the tree house, saying it reminded him of growing up in Lebanon. The following morning he was subdued; I suspect there were not as many mosquitoes in Lebanon as we had in our garden. But at dinner the previous night he had been in high spirits. The conversation had turned, as always, to politics. He and my mother had argued about Turkey and Russia, Britain’s role in the development of the Middle East conflict, the USA’s roughshod foreign policy and its effect on the world—and, of course, the Armenian Genocide, and the killingof Turkish governmental representatives by Armenians, in Australia and across the world, during the 1980s. He had intimated he knew the attackers and had materially supported them. But surely it was the beer talking. Later, when I asked my mother, she looked at me with round eyes and shrugged, uncharacteristically silent. 2002: Greek-American diva Diamanda Galas performed Dexifiones: Will and Testament at the Perth Concert Hall, her operatic work for “the forgotten victims of the Armenian and Anatolian Greek Genocide” (Galas).Her voice is so powerful it alters me.1925: My grandmother, Hovsanna, and my grandfather, Benyamin, had twice been separated in the Genocide (1915 and 1922) and twice reunited. But in early 1925, she had buried him, once a prosperous businessman, in a swamp. Armenians were not permitted burial in cemeteries. Once they had lived together in a big house with their dozen children; now there were only three with her. Maree, half-mad and 18 years old, and quiet Hovsep, aged seven,walked. Then five-year-old aunt, Arusiak—small, hungry, tired—had been carried by Hovsanna for months. They were walking from Cilicia to Jerusalem and its Armenian Quarter. Someone had said they had seen Krikor, her eldest son, there. Hovsanna was pregnant for the last time. Together the four reached Aleppo in Syria, found a Christian orphanage for girls, and Hovsanna, her pregnancy near its end, could carry Arusiak no further. She left her, promising to return. Hovsanna’s pains began in Beirut’s busy streets. She found privacy in the only place she could, under a house, crawled in. Whenever my mother spoke of her birth she described it like this: I was born under a stranger’s house like a dog.1975: My friend and I travelled to Albany by bus. After six hours we were looking down York Street, between Mount Clarence and Mount Melville, and beyond to Princess Royal Harbour, sapphire blue, and against which the town’s prosperous life—its shopfronts, hotels, cars, tourists, historic buildings—played out. It took away my breath: the deep harbour, whaling history, fishing boats. Rain and sun and scudding cloud; cliffs and swells; rocky points and the white curves of bays. It was from Albany that young Western Australian men, volunteers for World War I, embarked on ships for the Middle East, Gallipoli, sailing out of Princess Royal Harbour.1985: The Australian Government announced that Turkey had agreed to have the site of the 1915 Gallipoli landings renamed Anzac Cove. Commentators and politicians acknowledged it as historic praised Turkey for her generosity, expressed satisfaction that, 70 years on, former foes were able to embrace the shared human experience of war. We were justifiably proud of ourselves.2005: Turkey made her own requests. The entrance to Albany’s Princess Royal Harbour was renamed Ataturk Channel. A large bronze statue of Ataturk was erected on the headland overlooking the Harbour entrance. 24 April 1915: In the town of Hasan Beyli, in Cilicia, southwest Turkey, my great grandfather, a successful and respected businessman in his 50s, was asleep in his bed beside his wife. He had been born in that house, as had his father, grandfather, and all his children. His brother, my great uncle, had bought the house next door as a young man, brought his bride home to it, lived there ever since; between the two households there had been one child after another. All the cousins grew up together. My great grandfather and great uncle had gone to work that morning, despite their wives’ concerns, but had returned home early. The women had been relieved to see them. They made coffee, talked. Everyone had heard the rumours. Enemy ships were massing off the coast. 1978: The second time in Albany was my honeymoon. We had driven into the Goldfields then headed south. Such distance, such beautiful strangeness: red earth, red rocks; scant forests of low trees, thin arms outstretched; the dry, pale, flat land of Norseman. Shimmering heat. Then the big, wild coast.On our second morning—a cool, overcast day—we took our handline to a jetty. The ocean was mercury; a line of cormorants settled and bobbed. Suddenly fish bit; we reeled them in. I leaned over the jetty’s side, looked down into the deep. The water was clear and undisturbed save the twirling of a pike that looked like it had reversed gravity and was shooting straight up to me. Its scales flashed silver as itbroke the surface.1982: How could I concentrate on splicing a film with this story in my head? Besides the desk, the only other furniture in the editing suite was a whiteboard. I took a marker and divided the board into three columns for the three generations: my grandparents, Hovsanna and Benyamin; my mother; someone like me. There was a lot in the first column, some in the second, nothing in the third. I stared at the blankness of my then-young life.A teacher came in to check my editing. I tried to explain what I had been doing. “I think,” he said, stony-faced, “that should be your third film, not your first.”When he had gone I stared at the reels of film, the white board blankness, the wall. It took 25 years to find the form, the words to say it: a novel not a film, prose not pictures.2007: Ten minutes before the launch of The Edge of the World, the venue was empty. I made myself busy, told myself: what do you expect? Your research has shown, over and over, this is a story about which few know or very much care, an inconvenient, unfashionable story; it is perfectly in keeping that no-one will come. When I stepped onto the rostrum to speak, there were so many people that they crowded the doorway, spilled onto the pavement. “I want to thank my mother,” I said, “who, pretending to do her homework, listened instead to the story her mother told other Armenian survivor-women, kept that story for 50 years, and then passed it on to me.” 2013: There is a section of The Edge of the World I needed to find because it had really happened and, when it happened, I knew, there in my living room, that Boyajian and Grigorian (183) were right about the Armenian Genocide being “still operative.” But I knew even more than that: I knew that the Diaspora triggered by genocide is both rescue and weapon, the new life in this host nation both sanctuary and betrayal. I picked up a copy, paced, flicked, followed my nose, found it:On 25 April, the day after Genocide memorial-day, I am watching television. The Prime Minister stands at the ANZAC memorial in western Turkey and delivers a poetic and moving speech. My eyes fill with tears, and I moan a little and cover them. In his speech he talks about the heroism of the Turkish soldiers in their defence of their homeland, about the extent of their losses – sixty thousand men. I glance at my son. He raises his eyebrows at me. I lose count of how many times Kemal Ataturk is mentioned as the Father of Modern Turkey. I think of my grandmother and grandfather, and all my baby aunts and uncles […] I curl over like a mollusc; the ache in my chest draws me in. I feel small and very tired; I feel like I need to wash.Is it true that if we repeat something often enough and loud enough it becomes the truth? The Prime Minister quotes Kemal Ataturk: the ANZACS who died and are buried on that western coast are deemed ‘sons of Turkey’. My son turns my grandfather’s, my mother’s, my eyes to me and says, It is amazing they can be so friendly after we attacked them.I draw up my knees to my chest, lay my head and arms down. My limbs feel weak and useless. My throat hurts. I look at my Australian son with his Armenian face (325-6).24 April 1915 cont: There had been trouble all my great grandfather’s life: pogrom here, massacre there. But this land was accustomed to colonisers: the Mongols, the Persians, latterly the Ottomans. They invade, conquer, rise, fall; Armenians stay. This had been Armenian homeland for thousands of years.No-one masses ships off a coast unless planning an invasion. So be it. These Europeans could not be worse than the Ottomans. That night, were my great grandfather and great uncle awoken by the pounding at each door, or by the horses and gendarmes’ boots? They were seized, each family herded at gunpoint into its garden, and made to watch. Hanging is slow. There could be no mistakes. The gendarmes used the stoutest branches, stayed until they were sure the men weredead. This happened to hundreds of prominent Armenian men all over Turkey that night.Before dawn, the Allies made landfall.Each year those lost in the Genocide are remembered on 24 April, the day before ANZAC Day.1969: I asked my mother if she had any brothers and sisters. She froze, her hands in the sink. I stared at her, then slipped from the room.1915: The Ottoman government decreed: all Armenians were to surrender their documents and report to authorities. Able-bodied men were taken away, my grandfather among them. Women and children, the elderly and disabled, were told to prepare to walk to a safe camp where they would stay for the duration of the war. They would be accompanied by armed soldiers for their protection. They were permitted to take with them what they could carry (Bryce 1916).It began immediately, pretty young women and children first. There are so many ways to kill. Months later, a few dazed, starved survivors stumbled into the Syrian desert, were driven into lakes, or herded into churches and set alight.Most husbands and fathers were never seen again. 2003: I arrived early at my son’s school, parked in the shade, opened The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, and began to read. Soon I was annotating furiously. Ruth Wajnryb writes of “growing up among innocent peers in an innocent landscape” and also that the notion of “freedom of speech” in Australia “seems often, to derive from that innocent landscape where reside people who have no personal scars or who have little relevant historical knowledge” (141).1984: I travelled to Vancouver, Canada, and knocked on Arusiak’s door. Afraid she would not agree to meet me, I hadn’t told her I was coming. She was welcoming and gracious. This was my first experience of extended family and I felt loved in a new and important way, a way I had read about, had observed in my friends, had longed for. One afternoon she said, “You know our mother left me in an orphanage…When I saw her again, it was too late. I didn’t know who they were, what a family was. I felt nothing.” “Yes, I know,” I replied, my heart full and hurting. The next morning, over breakfast, she quietly asked me to leave. 1926: When my mother was a baby, her 18 year-old sister, Maree, tried to drown her in the sea. My mother clearly recalled Maree’s face had been disfigured by a sword. Hovsanna, would ask my mother to forgive Maree’s constant abuse and bad behaviour, saying, “She is only half a person.”1930: Someone gave Hovsanna the money to travel to Aleppo and reclaim Arusiak, by then 10 years old. My mother was intrigued by the appearance of this sister but Arusiak was watchful and withdrawn. When she finally did speak to my then five-year-old mother, she hissed: “Why did she leave me behind and keep you?”Soon after Arusiak appeared, Maree, “only half a person,” disappeared. My mother was happy about that.1935: At 15, Arusiak found a live-in job and left. My mother was 10 years old; her brother Hovsep, who cared for her before and after school every day while their mother worked, and always had, was seventeen. She adored him. He had just finished high school and was going to study medicine. One day he fell ill. He died within a week.1980: My mother told me she never saw her mother laugh or, once Hovsep died, in anything other than black. Two or three times before Hovsep died, she saw her smile a little, and twice she heard her singing when she thought she was alone: “A very sad song,” my mother would say, “that made me cry.”1942: At seventeen, my mother had been working as a live-in nanny for three years. Every week on her only half-day off she had caught the bus home. But now Hovsanna was in hospital, so my mother had been visiting her there. One day her employer told her she must go to the hospital immediately. She ran. Hovsanna was lying alone and very still. Something wasn’t right. My mother searched the hospital corridors but found no-one. She picked up a phone. When someone answered she told them to send help. Then she ran all the way home, grabbed Arusiak’s photograph and ran all the way back. She laid it on her mother’s chest, said, “It’s all right, Mama, Arusiak’s here.”1976: My mother said she didn’t like my boyfriend; I was not to go out with him. She said she never disobeyed her own mother because she really loved her mother. I went out with my boyfriend. When I came home, my belongings were on the front porch. The door was bolted. I was seventeen.2003: I read Wajnryb who identifies violent eruptions of anger and frozen silences as some of the behaviours consistent in families with a genocidal history (126). 1970: My father had been dead over a year. My brothers and I were, all under 12, made too much noise. My mother picked up the phone: she can’t stand us, she screamed; she will call an orphanage to take us away. We begged.I fled to my room. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t keep still. I paced, pressed my face into a corner; shook and cried, knowing (because she had always told us so) that she didn’t make idle threats, knowing that this was what I had sometimes glimpsed on her face when she looked at us.2012: The Internet reveals images of Ataturk’s bronze statue overlooking Princess Royal Harbour. Of course, it’s outsized, imposing. The inscription on its plinth reads: "Peace at Home/ Peace in the World." He wears a suit, looks like a scholar, is moving towards us, a scroll in his hand. The look in his eyes is all intensity. Something distant has arrested him – a receding or re-emerging vision. Perhaps a murmur that builds, subsides, builds again. (Medz Yeghern, Aksor, Aghed, Genocide). And what is written on that scroll?2013: My partner suggested we go to Albany, escape Perth’s brutal summer. I tried to explain why it’s impossible. There is no memorial in Albany, or anywhere else in Western Australia, to the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide. ReferencesAkcam, Taner. “The Politics of Genocide.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 11 Dec. 2011. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OxAJaaw81eU&noredirect=1genocide›.Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigress: The Armenian Genocide. London: William Heinemann, 2004.BBC. “Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938).” BBC History. 2013. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/ataturk_kemal.shtml›.Boyajian, Levon, and Haigaz Grigorian. “Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide.”The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. Ed. Richard Hovannisian. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. 177–85.Bryce, Viscount. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916.Galas, Diamanda. Program Notes. Dexifiones: Will and Testament. Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. 2001.———.“Dexifiones: Will and Testament FULL Live Lisboa 2001 Part 1.” Online Video Clip. YouTube, 5 Nov. 2011. Web. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvVnYbxWArM›.Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47.Manne, Robert. “A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.” The Monthly Feb. 2007. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/turkish-tale-gallipoli-and-armenian-genocide-robert-manne-459›.Matiossian, Vartan. “When Dictionaries Are Left Unopened: How ‘Medz Yeghern’ Turned into a Terminology of Denial.” The Armenian Weekly 27 Nov. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/11/27/when-dictionaries-are-left-unopened-how-medz-yeghern-turned-into-terminology-of-denial/›.Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Nicholson, Brendan. “ASIO Detected Bomb Plot by Armenian Terrorists.” The Australian 2 Jan. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/cabinet-papers/asio-detected-bomb-plot-by-armenian-terrorists/story-fnbkqb54-1226234411154›.“President Obama Issues Statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.” The Armenian Weekly 24 Apr. 2012. 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/04/24/president-obama-issues-statement-on-armenian-remembrance-day/›.Polain, Marcella. The Edge of the World. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007.Siamanto. “The Dance.” Trans. Peter Balakian and Nervart Yaghlian. Adonias Dalgas Memorial Page 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.terezakis.com/dalgas.html›.Stockings, Craig. “Let’s Have a Truce in the Battle of the Anzac Myth.” The Australian 25 Apr. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/lets-have-a-truce-in-the-battle-of-the-anzac-myth/story-e6frgd0x-1226337486382›.Wajnryb, Ruth. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2001.

Abstract:

In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Wildwood Enterprises. 1976.Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. “Oliver Stone- Satire and Controversy.” 23 Mar. 2013. 30 Juy 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s2gBKApxyk>.Bauman, Zygmunt. Flüchtige Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thomson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.Born on the 4th of July. Dir. Oliver Stone. Ixtian, 1989.The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Brothers, Legendary Entertainment. 2008.Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.The Fifth Estate. Dir. Bill Condon. Dreamworks, Anonymous Content (a.o.). 2013.Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Vol. 3. Ed. James D. Faubion. Penguin Books, 2000. 111-33.Frazer, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond.” American Affairs 1.4 (2017). 19 May. 2020 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/>.Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.“Full Transcript of the Yanis Varoufakis/Noam Chomsky NYPL Discussion.” Yanisvaroufakis.eu, 28 June 2016. 15 Mar. 2020 <https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/06/28/full-transcript-of-the-yanis-varoufakis-noam-chomsky-nypl-discussion/>.Greenwald, Glenn. Die globale Überwachung: Der Fall Snowden, die amerikanischen Geheimdienste und die Folgen. München: Knaur, 2015.The Harder They Fall. Dir. Mark Robson. Columbia Pictures. 1956.The Insider. Dir. Michael Mann. Touchstone Pictures, Mann/Roth Productions (a.o.). 1999.JFK. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros., 1991.Kohn, Stephen Martin. The Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself. Guilford, Lyons P, 2011.Leigh, David, and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. London: Guardian Books, 2011.McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper-Collins, 1997.Moretti, Anthony. “Whistleblower or Traitor: Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg and the Power of Media Celebrity.” Moscow Readings Conference, 14-15 Nov. 2013, Moscow, Russia.North Country. Dir. Niki Caro. Warner Bros., Industry Entertainment (a.o.). 2005.On the Waterfront. Dir. Elia Kazan. Horizon Pictures. 1954.Oushakine, Sergei A. “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat.” Public Culture 13.2 (2001): 191-214.Platoon. Dir. Oliver Stone. Hemdake, Cinema ‘84. 1986.Polychroniou, C.J. “Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor: An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” Truthout, 11 Dec. 2016. 25 May 2020 <https://truthout.org/articles/socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/>.Scott, A.O. “Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower.” The New York Times, 15 Sep. 2016. 5 May 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/movies/snowden-review-oliver-stone-joseph-gordon-levitt.html>. Serpico. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Artists Entertainment Complex, Produzioni De Laurentiis. 1973. Silkwood. Dir. Mike Nichols. ABC Motion Pictures. 1983.Snowden. Dir. Oliver Stone. Krautpack Entertainment, Wild Bunch (a.o.). 2016.Žižek, Slavoj. “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks.” Los Angeles Review of Books 33.2 (2011). 15 May 2020 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks>.———. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2013.———. Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. New York: Polity, 2020.———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 2008.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2020.

Abstract:

I have decided to launch a campaign against the skyscraper, that hideous, mediocre form of architecture…. Today we only have an empty version of it, only competing in height.— Rem Koolhaas, “Kool Enough for Beijing?”Figure 1: The CCTV Headquarters—A Courtyard in the Air. Cher Coad, 2020.Introduction: An Anomaly within an Anomaly Construction of Beijing’s China Central Television Headquarters (henceforth CCTV Headquarters) began in 2004 and the building was officially completed in 2012. It is a project by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) headed by Rem Koolhaas (1944-), who has been called “the coolest, hippest, and most cutting-edge architect on the planet”(“Rem Koolhaas Biography”). The CCTV Headquarters is a distinctive feature of downtown Beijing and is heavily associated in the Western world with 21st-century China. It is often used as the backdrop for reports from the China correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Bill Birtles. The construction of the CCTV Headquarters, however, was very much an international enterprise. Koolhaas himself is Dutch, and the building was one of the first projects the OMA did outside of America after 9/11. As Koolhaas describes it: we had incredible emphasis on New York for five years, and America for five years, and what we decided to do after September 11 when we realized that, you know, things were going to be different in America: [was] to also orient ourselves eastwards [Koolhaas goes on to describe two projects: the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia and the CCTV Headquarters]. (Rem Koolhaas Interview) Problematically, Koolhaas claims that the building we created for CCTV could never have been conceived by the Chinese and could never have been built by Europeans. It is a hybrid by definition. It was also a partnership, not a foreign imposition…. There was a huge Chinese component from the very beginning. We tried to do a building that conveys that it has emerged from the local situation. (Fraioli 117) Our article reinterprets this reading. We suggest that the OMA’s “incredible emphasis” on America—home of the world’s first skyscraper: the Home Insurance Building built in 1885 in Chicago, Illinois—pivotally spills over into its engagement with China. The emergence of the CCTV Headquarters “from the local situation”, such as it is, is more in spite of Koolhaas’s stated “hybrid” approach than because of it, for what’s missing from his analysis of the CCTV Headquarters’ provenance is the siheyuan or classical Chinese courtyard house. We will argue that the CCTV Headquarters is an anomaly within an anomaly in contemporary Beijing’s urban landscape, to the extent that it turns the typologies of both the (vertical, American) skyscraper and the (horizontal, Chinese) siheyuan on a 90 degree angle. The important point to make here, however, is that these two anomalous elements of the building are not of the same order. While the anomalous re-configuration of the skyscraper typology is clearly part of Koolhaas’s architectural manifesto, it is against his architectural intentionality that the CCTV Headquarters sustains the typology of the siheyuan. This bespeaks the persistent and perhaps functional presence of traditional Chinese architecture and urbanism in the building. Koolhaas’s building contains both starkly evident and more secretive anomalies. Ironically then, there is a certain truth in Koolhaas’s words, beneath the critique we made of it above as an example of American-dominated, hom*ogenising globalisation. And the significance of the CCTV Headquarters’ hybridity as both skyscraper and siheyuan can be elaborated through Daniel M. Abramson’s thesis that a consideration of unbuilt architecture has the potential to re-open architecture to its historical conditions. Roberto Schwarz argues that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). Drawing on Schwarz’s work and Abramson’s, we conclude that the historical presence—as secretive anomaly—of the siheyuan in the CCTV Headquarters suggests that the building’s formal debt to the siheyuan (more so than to the American skyscraper) may continue to unsettle the “specific social relationship” of Chinese to Western society (Schwarz 53). The site of this unsettlement, we suggest, is data. The CCTV Headquarters might well be the most data-rich site in all of China—it is, after all, a monumental television station. Suggestively, this wealth of airborne data is literally enclosed within the aerial “courtyard”, with its classical Chinese form, of the CCTV Headquarters. This could hardly be irrelevant in the context of the geo-politics of globalised data. The “form of data”, to coin a phrase, radiates through all the social consequences of data flow and usage, and here the form of data is entwined with a form always already saturated with social consequence. The secretive architectural anomaly of Koolhaas’s building is thus a heterotopic space within the broader Western engagement with China, so much of which relates to flows and captures of data. The Ubiquitous Siheyuan or Classical Chinese Courtyard House According to Ying Liu and Adenrele Awotona, “the courtyard house, a residential compound with buildings surrounding a courtyard on four (or sometimes three) sides, has been representative of housing patterns for over one thousand years in China” (248). Liu and Awotona state that “courtyard house patterns could be found in many parts of China, but the most typical forms are those located in the Old City in Beijing, the capital of China for over eight hundred years” (252). In their reading, the siheyuan is a peculiarly elastic architectural typology, whose influence is present as much in the Forbidden City as in the humble family home (252). Prima facie then, it is not surprising that it has also secreted itself within the architectural form of Koolhaas’s creation. It is important to note, however, that while the “most typical forms” of the siheyuan are indeed still to be found in Beijing, the courtyard house is an increasingly uncommon sight in the Chinese capital. An article in the China Daily from 2004 refers to the “few remaining siheyuan” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). That said, all is not lost for the siheyuan. Liu and Awotona discuss how the classical form of the courtyard house has been modified to more effectively house current residents in the older parts of Beijing while protecting “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” (254). “Basic design principles” (255) of the siheyuan have supported “a transition from the traditional single-household courtyard housing form to a contemporary multi-household courtyard housing form” (254). In this process, approaches of “urban renewal [involving] demolition” and “preservation, renovation and rebuilding” have been taken (255). Donia Zhang extends the work of Liu and Awotona in the elaboration of her thesis that “Chinese-Americans interested in building Chinese-style courtyard houses in America are keen to learn about their architectural heritage” (47). Zhang’s article concludes with an illustration that shows how the siheyuan may be merged with the typical American suburban dwelling (66). The final thing to emphasise about the siheyuan is what Liu and Awotona describe as its “special introverted quality” (249). The form is saturated with social consequence by virtue of its philosophical undergirding. The coincidence of philosophies of Daoism (including feng-shui) and Confucianism in the architecture and spatiality of the classical Chinese courtyard house makes it an exceedingly odd anomaly of passivity and power (250-51). The courtyard itself has a highly charged role in the management of family, social and cultural life, which, we suggest, survives its transposition into novel architectural environments. Figure 2: The CCTV Headquarters—Looking Up at “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020. The CCTV Headquarters: A New Type of Skyscraper? Rem Koolhaas is not the only architect to interrogate the standard skyscraper typology. In his essay from 1999, “The Architecture of the Future”, Norman Foster argues that “the world’s increasing ecological crisis” (278) is in part a function of “unchecked urban sprawl” (279). A new type of skyscraper, he suggests, might at least ameliorate the sprawl of our cities: the Millennium Tower that we have proposed in Tokyo takes a traditional horizontal city quarter—housing, shops, restaurants, cinemas, museums, sporting facilities, green spaces and public transport networks—and turns it on its side to create a super-tall building with a multiplicity of uses … . It would create a virtually self-sufficient, fully self-sustaining community in the sky. (279) Koolhaas follows suit, arguing that “the actual point of the skyscraper—to increase worker density—has been lost. Skyscrapers are now only momentary points of high density spaced so far apart that they don’t actually increase density at all” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Foster’s solution to urban sprawl is to make the horizontal (an urban segment) vertical; Koolhaas’s is to make the vertical horizontal: “we’ve [OMA] come up with two types: a very low-rise series of buildings, or a single, condensed hyperbuilding. What we’re doing with CCTV is a prototype of the hyperbuilding” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Interestingly, the “low-rise” type mentioned here brings to mind the siheyuan—textual evidence, perhaps, that the siheyuan is always already a silent fellow traveller of the CCTV Headquarters project. The CCTV Headquarters is, even at over 200 metres tall itself, an anomaly of horizontalism amidst Beijing’s pervasive skyscraper verticality. As Paul Goldberger reports, “some Beijingers have taken to calling it Big Shorts”, which again evokes horizontality. This is its most obvious anomaly, and a somewhat melancholy reminder of “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” now mutilated by skyscrapers (Liu and Awotona 254). In the same gesture, however, with which it lays the skyscraper on its side, Koolhaas’s creation raises into the air the shape of the courtyard of a classical Chinese house. To our knowledge, no one has noticed this before, let alone written about it. It is, to be sure, a genuine courtyard shape—not merely an archway or a bridge with unoccupied space between. Pure building entirely surrounds the vertical courtyard shape formed in the air. Most images of the building provide an orientation that maximises the size of its vertical courtyard. To this extent, the (secret) courtyard shape of the building is hidden in plain sight. It is possible, however, to make the courtyard narrow to a mere slit of space, and finally to nothing, by circumnavigating the building. Certain perspectives on the building can even make it look like a more-or-less ordinary skyscraper. But, as a quick google-image search reveals, such views are rare. What seems to make the building special to people is precisely that part of it that is not building. Furthermore, anyone approaching the CCTV Headquarters with the intention of locating a courtyard typology within its form will be disappointed unless they look to its vertical plane. There is no hint of a courtyard at the base of the building. Figure 3: The CCTV Headquarters—View from “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Figure 4: The CCTV Headquarters—Looking through the Floor of “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Visiting the CCTV Headquarters: A “Special Introverted Quality?” In January 2020, we visited the CCTV Headquarters, ostensibly as audience members for a recording of a science spectacular show. Towards the end of the recording, we were granted a quick tour of the building. It is rare for foreigners to gain access to the sections of the building we visited. Taking the lift about 40 floors up, we arrived at the cantilever level—known informally as “the overhang”. Glass discs in the floor allow one to walk out over nothingness, looking down on ant-like pedestrians. Looking down like this was also to peer into the vacant “courtyard” of the building—into a structure “turned or pushed inward on itself”, which is the anatomical definition of “introverted” (Oxford Languages Dictionary). Workers in the building evinced no great affection for it, and certainly nothing of our wide-eyed wonder. Somebody said, “it’s just a place to work”. One of this article’s authors, Patrick West, seemed to feel the overhang almost imperceptibly vibrating beneath him. (Still, he has also experienced this sensation in conventional skyscrapers.) We were told the rumour that the building has started to tilt over dangerously. Being high in the air, but also high on the air, with nothing but air beneath us, felt edgy—somehow special—our own little world. Koolhaas promotes the CCTV Headquarters as (in paraphrase) “its own city, its own community” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). This resonated with us on our visit. Conventional skyscrapers fracture any sense of community through their segregated floor-upon-floor verticality; there is never enough room for a little patch of horizontal urbanism to unroll. Within “the overhang”, the CCTV Headquarters felt unlike a standard skyscraper, as if we were in an urban space magically levitated from the streets below. Sure, we had been told by one of the building’s inhabitants that it was “just a place to work”—but compared to the bleak sterility of most skyscraper work places, it wasn’t that sterile. The phrase Liu and Awotona use of the siheyuan comes to mind here, as we recall our experience; somehow, we had been inside a different type of building, one with its own “special introverted quality” (249). Special, that is, in the sense of containing just so much of horizontal urbanism as allows the building to retain its introverted quality as “its own city” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Figure 5: The CCTV Headquarters—View from “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Figure 6: The CCTV Headquarters—Inside “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020. Unbuilt Architecture: The Visionary and the Contingent Within the present that it constitutes, built architecture is surrounded by unbuilt architecture at two interfaces: where the past ends; where the future begins. The soupy mix of urbanism continually spawns myriad architectural possibilities, and any given skyscraper is haunted by all the skyscrapers it might have been. History and the past hang heavily from them. Meanwhile, architectural programme or ambition—such as it is—pulls in the other direction: towards an idealised (if not impossible to practically realise) future. Along these lines, Koolhaas and the OMA are plainly a future-directed, as well as self-aware, architectural unit: at OMA we try to build in the greatest possible tolerance and the least amount of rigidity in terms of embodying one particular moment. We want our buildings to evolve. A building has at least two lives—the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward—and they are never the same. (Fraioli 115) Koolhaas makes the same point even more starkly with regard to the CCTV Headquarters project through his use of the word “prototype”: “what we’re doing with CCTV is a prototype of the hyperbuilding” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). At the same time, however, as the presence of the siheyuan within the architecture of the CCTV Headquarters shows, the work of the OMA cannot escape from the superabundance of history, within which, as Roberto Schwarz claims, “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). Supporting our contentions here, Daniel M. Abramson notes that unbuilt architecture implies two sub-categories … the visionary unbuilt, and the contingent … . Visionary schemes invite a forward glance, down one true, vanguard path to a reformed society and discipline. The contingent unbuilts, conversely, invite a backward glance, along multiple routes history might have gone, each with its own likelihood and validity; no privileged truths. (Abramson)Introducing Abramson’s theory to the example of the CCTV Headquarters, the “visionary unbuilt” lines up with Koolhaas’ thesis that the building is a future-directed “prototype”. while the clearest candidate for the “contingent unbuilt”, we suggest, is the siheyuan. Why? Firstly, the siheyuan is hidden in plain sight, within the framing architecture of the CCTV Headquarters; secondly, it is ubiquitous in Beijing urbanism—little wonder then that it turns up, unannounced, in this Beijing building; thirdly, and related to the second point, the two buildings share a “special introverted quality” (Liu and Awotona 249). “The contingent”, in this case, is the anomaly nestled within the much more blatant “visionary” (or futuristic) anomaly—the hyperbuilding to come—of the Beijing-embedded CCTV Headquarters. Koolhaas’s building’s most fascinating anomaly relates, not to any forecast of the future, but to the subtle persistence of the past—its muted quotation of the ancient siheyuan form. Our article is, in part, a response to Abramson’s invitation to “pursue … the consequences of the unbuilt … [and thus] to open architectural history more fully to history”. We have supplemented Abramson’s idea with Schwarz’s suggestion that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). The anomaly of the siheyuan—alongside that of the hyperbuilding—within the CCTV headquarters, opens the building up (paraphrasing Abramson) to a fuller analysis of its historical positioning within Western and Eastern flows of globalisation (or better, as we are about to suggest, of glocalisation). In parallel, its form (paraphrasing Schwarz) abstracts and re-presents this history’s specific social relationships. Figure 7: The CCTV Headquarters—A Courtyard of Data. Cher Coad, 2020.Conclusion: A Courtyard of Data and Tensions of Glocalisation Koolhaas proposes that the CCTV Headquarters was “a partnership, not a foreign imposition” and that the building “emerged from the local situation” (Fraioli 117). To us, this smacks of Pollyanna globalisation. The CCTV Headquarters is, we suggest, more accurately read as an imposition of the American skyscraper typology, albeit in anomalous form. (One might even argue that the building’s horizontal deviation from the vertical norm reinforces that norm.) Still, amidst a thicket of conventionally vertical skyscrapers, the building’s horizontalism does have the anomalous effect of recalling “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” (Liu and Awotona 254). Buried within its horizontalism, however, lies a more secretive anomaly in the form of a vertical siheyuan. This anomaly, we contend, motivates a terminological shift from “globalisation” to “glocalisation”, for the latter term better captures the notion of a lack of reconciliation between the “global” and the “local” in the building. Koolhaas’s visionary architectural programme explicitly advances anomaly. The CCTV Headquarters radically reworks the skyscraper typology as the prototype of a hyperbuilding defined by horizontalism. Certainly, such horizontalism recalls the horizontal plane of pre-skyscraper Beijing and, if faintly, that plane’s ubiquitous feature: the classical courtyard house. Simultaneously, however, the siheyuan has a direct if secretive presence within the morphology of the CCTV Headquarters, even as any suggestion of a vertical courtyard is strikingly absent from Koolhaas’s vanguard manifesto. To this extent, the hyperbuilding fits within Abramson’s category of “the visionary unbuilt”, while the siheyuan aligns with Abramson’s “contingent unbuilt” descriptor. The latter is the “might have been” that, largely under the pressure of its ubiquity as Beijing vernacular architecture, “very nearly is”. Drawing on Schwarz’s idea that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships”, we propose that the siheyuan, as anomalous form of the CCTV Headquarters, is a heterotopic space within the hybrid global harmony (to paraphrase Koolhaas) purportedly represented by the building (53). In this space thus formed collides the built-up historical and philosophical social intensity of the classical Chinese courtyard house and the intensities of data flows and captures that help constitute the predominantly capitalist and neo-liberalist “social relationship” of China and the Western world—the world of the skyscraper (Schwarz). Within the siheyuan of the CCTV Headquarters, globalised data is literally enveloped by Daoism and Confucianism; it is saturated with the social consequence of local place. The term “glocalisation” is, we suggest, to be preferred here to “globalisation”, because of how it better reflects such vernacular interruptions to the hegemony of globalised space. Forms delineate social relationships, and data, which both forms and is formed by social relationships, may be formed by architecture as much as anything else within social space. Attention to the unbuilt architectural forms (vanguard and contingent) contained within the CCTV Headquarters reveals layers of anomaly that might, ultimately, point to another form of architecture entirely, in which glocal tensions are not only recognised, but resolved. Here, Abramson’s historical project intersects, in the final analysis, with a worldwide politics. Figure 8: The CCTV Headquarters—A Sound Stage in Action. Cher Coad, 2020. References Abramson, Daniel M. “Stakes of the Unbuilt.” Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. 20 July 2020. <http://we-aggregate.org/piece/stakes-of-the-unbuilt>.Foster, N. “The Architecture of the Future.” The Architecture Reader: Essential Writings from Vitruvius to the Present. Ed. A. Krista Sykes. New York: George Braziller, 2007: 276-79. 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Stockholm, Sweden: Royal Institute of Technology, 1996: 248-60. <https://iaps.architexturez.net/system/files/pdf/1202bm1029.content.pdf>.Oxford Languages Dictionary. “Rem Koolhaas Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. 20 July 2020. <https://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ge-La/Koolhaas-Rem.html>. “Rem Koolhaas Interview.” Manufacturing Intellect. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 2003. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW187PwSjY0>.Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. New York: Verso, 1992. Zhang, Donia. “Classical Courtyard Houses of Beijing: Architecture as Cultural Artifact.” Space and Communication 1.1 (Dec. 2015): 47-68.