Journal articles: 'Belin, René' – Grafiati (2024)

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The Chair, Renee Kra, opened the Workshop with the announcement that the IRDB will be officially located at the Geosciences Department, University of Arizona, Tucson, and will begin operating on January 2, 1989.

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AbstractThe purpose of this article is to begin to renew the theme of nature as a central, even unavoidable, question for philosophizing today. Furthermore, the argument is made that this question is most productively posed as a question concerning ethical life. Texts by Aristotle, Kant and Höderlin are considered. Attention to Heidegger's concerns with technology also serves to guide the issues here.

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The procedural design of criminal case handling under the Criminal Procedure Code (KUHAP) places a Notification Letter to Begin an Investigation (SPDP) as an initial step in monitoring and controlling investigation. The KUHAP Control and Supervision Model by placing SPDP is lex specialis as the initial instrument of control and supervision of corruption case investigation, but this has undergone changes that can reduce the principle of functional coordination of investigation and at the same time negate the authority of the Public Prosecutor to follow up on investigation of corruption case due to the Decision of the Constitutional Court (MK) Number 130/PUU-XIII/2015. Thus, the Public Prosecutor is no longer in the position of supervisor and controller of investigation of corruption case, because the public prosecutor is only authorized as the apparatus of the investigation results, receives the minutes of investigation (BAP) and receives legal means of proof and suspects to proceed to the trial phase. The implementation of SPDP after the Constitutional Court Decision No. 130/PUU-XIII/2015 brings a new atmosphere in the criminal justice process specifically at the pre-trial phase that requires adjustments, and the rest cannot be accurately predicted, therefore it is recommended that the investigator of Indonesian National Police (Polri) can renew the Standard Operating Procedure in order to be more adaptive and professional.

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International trade unionism faces a major challenge. Historically, Global Union Federations have been small and relatively remote international union secretariats with limited capacity to mobilize and speak on behalf of local members. However, with the changing architecture of international capital and nation states, these union bodies have started to renew themselves. The argument is that the emergent political economy provides the base upon which these unions can begin to campaign and represent members in more dynamic ways than in the past. Critical to these developments has been the promulgation of International Framework Agreements which adapt and extend familiar tools of representation. The outcome is the possibility of a multi-faceted form of trade unionism.

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This paper examines the philosophy and practice of programs that aim to maintain, renew, or revive Aboriginal languages in Australia. I focus here on languages, mainly those of urban and rural rather than remote areas, for which there are few if any fluent speakers left. I will refer to them as dead or dying languages although I am aware that in the Aboriginal tradition people consider themselves to own languages that neither they themselves nor their dose kin speak, and that this ownership is very much a part of a living culture. I begin by reviewing some basic issues that arise in planning language programs for such languages. The final section considers some of the factors affecting the success of such programs.

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In this article I propose to do five things. First, I describe the present confusion disturbing the tranquility of the American polity. Next, I hypothesize that an important source of civil confusion is that American civildiscourse is generally conducted in two different moral languages. Neither of these is adequate to the reality of the human good, and their speakers are, perhaps increasingly, given to misunderstanding one another. Third, I propose some reasons why not only misunderstanding but even outright hostility seems to be growing. Fourth, I suggest that if we Christians are to be of genuine service to our fellow citizens, we have to begin by emancipating ourselves from inadequate moral languages and renew our capacity to function in a more properly Christian language. Finally, I suggest a possible contribution Christians might make to the renewal of civil discourse.

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In many developmental contexts, cell lineages have variable or flexible potency to self-renew. What drives a cell to exit from a proliferative state and begin differentiation, or to retain the capacity to divide days or years later is not clear. Here we exploit the mixed potential of the stomatal lineage ground cell (SLGC) in the Arabidopsis leaf epidermis as a model to explore how cells might balance potential to differentiate with a reentry into proliferation. By generating transcriptomes of fluorescence-activated cell sorting-isolated populations that combinatorically define SLGCs and integrating these data with other stomatal lineage datasets, we find that SLGCs appear poised between proliferation and endoreduplication. Furthermore, we found the RNA polymerase II-related mediator complex interactor DEK and the transcription factor MYB16 accumulate differentially in the stomatal lineage and influence the extent of cell proliferation during leaf development. These findings suggest that SLGC latent potential is maintained by poising of the cell cycle machinery, as well as general and site-specific gene-expression regulators.

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“Bakpia Ivan", Small and Medium Business Unit is managed by family and hereditary manner, so that several times there are employee turnover and sometimes causes the production process to be slightly inhibited. Another thing that is a problem is the lack of awareness of the product packaging process (creative packaging) that is able to attract consumer interest and from the side of packaging security. This problem is linear unoptimal brand awareness and brand patent rights, so that when the product arrives at the reseller, the packaging is often replaced with other brands even though the contents are Bakpia Ivan. The purpose of this public service activity, first is to increase awareness of product packaging, positioning. Secondly, providing socialization and training about creative packaging, starting from the most basic capabilities. The method used in this activity is socialization and training. First, socializing and demonstrating how to begin packaging. Secondly, renew the logo design. Third, conduct social experiments related to logo renewal. The result of this activity is the acceptance of product packaging updates by the market so it can be expand sales and market segmentation. Second, the renewal of the logo / packaging design will be increasingly recognized and realized loyal consumers. Keywords: creative packaging, bakpia ivan, segmentation, positioning

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This article deals with the relation between evaluation of school performance and other types of evaluation. The purpose of this paper is not to propose internal school evaluation as the central axis in the teaching-learning process, considering the ethical, political, pedagogical and social aspects throughout the evaluation process. The method was the direct observation of the evaluation routines, in state schools of Juazeiro do Norte-Ceará. Bibliographic research was also used to interpret the content. The arguments were constructed in order to renew the discussion on the subject, making possible new relations. The results led us to believe that the pedagogical alignment of school evaluation with other types of evaluation is an essential tool within a systemic view of education. There are interchangeable relations between these evaluations, with implications in the relations among the social actors, in a quest for social equity. Therefore, the bases of school evaluation tend to change, starting from an ethical and political stance, that begin at the local level, within the school. All forms of evaluation, internal and eternal, should contribute to consolidate the circle of communication between the social actors involved in schooling and to "feed" an information network in order to support more effective public education policies.

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AbstractAlthough most patients with cancer respond to therapy, few are cured. Moreover, objective clinical responses to treatment often do not even translate into substantial improvements in overall survival. For example, patients with indolent lymphoma who achieved a complete remission with conventional-dose therapies in the prerituximab era did not experience a survival advantage over similar patients treated with a “watch and wait” approach. Several studies have also shown that neither the magnitude nor the kinetics of clinical response has an impact on survival in multiple myeloma. Recent data suggesting many malignancies arise from a rare population of cells that exclusively maintains the ability to self-renew and sustains the tumor (ie, “cancer stem cells”) may help explain this paradox that response and survival are not always linked. Therapies that successfully eliminate the differentiated cancer cells characterizing the tumor may be ineffective against rare, biologically distinct cancer stem cells. New methods for assessing treatment efficacy must also be developed, as traditional response criteria measure tumor bulk and may not reflect changes in rare cancer stem cell populations. In this article, we discuss the evidence for cancer stem cells in hematologic malignancies and possible ways to begin targeting these cells and measuring clinical effectiveness of such treatment approaches.

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C.D. Keeling's measurements of the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere since 1957, tracking a rise that threatens global warming, form one of the most important scienti.c data sets ever created. Yet the relatively small funding Keeling required was rarely secure. He could begin his measurements only because of a one-time injection of funds into geophysics during the International Geophysical Year. The original aim was to take a "snapshot" which could be repeated a few decades later to .nd whether the level of the gas had risen as predicted. Keeling and his sponsors made personal appeals to divert additional funds so he could re.ne and extend his measurements; in consequence, with just two years of data he showed that the level was rising. In the following decades, maintaining fund-ing was problematic. Agencies saw the work as "routine monitoring" rather than cutting-edge research. In the 1970s, the rise of an environmental movement helped reframe climate change and CO2 emissions as a threat. Funding expanded within a context of monitoring atmospheric pollution and government agency empire building. But in the early 1980s, political reaction against environmentalism again threatened Keeling's program. The story re.ects larger trends over the past half-century towards the bureaucratization and politicization of science funding.

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Abstract Available evidence indicates that qualitative changes in hematopoietic stem cells and progenitors, such as the decision of stem cells to self- renew or differentiate, or selection of lineage potentials by the multipotential progenitors during differentiation (commitment), are intrinsic properties of the progenitors and are stochastic in nature. In-contrast, proliferative kinetics of the progenitors, namely survival and expansion of the progenitors, appear to be controlled by a number of interacting cytokines. While proliferation and maturation of committed progenitors is controlled by late-acting lineage-specific factors such as Ep, M-CSF, G-CSF, and IL-5, progenitors at earlier stages of development are controlled by a group of several overlapping cytokines. IL-3, GM-CSF, and IL-4 regulate proliferation of multipotential progenitors only after they exit from G0 and begin active cell proliferation. Triggering of cycling by dormant primitive progenitors and maintenance of B-cell potential of the primitive progenitors appears to require interactions of early acting cytokines including IL-6, G-CSF, IL-11, IL-12, LIF, and SF. Currently, this simple model fits our understanding of the interactions of growth factors with hematopoietic progenitors. Naturally the model risks oversimplification of a very complex process. However, because the model is testable, it will hopefully challenge investigators to design new experiments to examine its validity.

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Available evidence indicates that qualitative changes in hematopoietic stem cells and progenitors, such as the decision of stem cells to self- renew or differentiate, or selection of lineage potentials by the multipotential progenitors during differentiation (commitment), are intrinsic properties of the progenitors and are stochastic in nature. In-contrast, proliferative kinetics of the progenitors, namely survival and expansion of the progenitors, appear to be controlled by a number of interacting cytokines. While proliferation and maturation of committed progenitors is controlled by late-acting lineage-specific factors such as Ep, M-CSF, G-CSF, and IL-5, progenitors at earlier stages of development are controlled by a group of several overlapping cytokines. IL-3, GM-CSF, and IL-4 regulate proliferation of multipotential progenitors only after they exit from G0 and begin active cell proliferation. Triggering of cycling by dormant primitive progenitors and maintenance of B-cell potential of the primitive progenitors appears to require interactions of early acting cytokines including IL-6, G-CSF, IL-11, IL-12, LIF, and SF. Currently, this simple model fits our understanding of the interactions of growth factors with hematopoietic progenitors. Naturally the model risks oversimplification of a very complex process. However, because the model is testable, it will hopefully challenge investigators to design new experiments to examine its validity.

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BackgroundNephron progenitors, the cell population that give rise to the functional unit of the kidney, are metabolically active and self-renew under glycolytic conditions. A switch from glycolysis to mitochondrial respiration drives these cells toward differentiation, but the mechanisms that control this switch are poorly defined. Studies have demonstrated that kidney formation is highly dependent on oxygen concentration, which is largely regulated by von Hippel-Lindau (VHL; a protein component of a ubiquitin ligase complex) and hypoxia-inducible factors (a family of transcription factors activated by hypoxia).MethodsTo explore VHL as a regulator defining nephron progenitor self-renewal versus differentiation, we bred Six2-TGCtg mice with VHLlox/lox mice to generate mice with a conditional deletion of VHL from Six2+ nephron progenitors. We used histologic, immunofluorescence, RNA sequencing, and metabolic assays to characterize kidneys from these mice and controls during development and up to postnatal day 21.ResultsBy embryonic day 15.5, kidneys of nephron progenitor cell–specific VHL knockout mice begin to exhibit reduced maturation of nephron progenitors. Compared with controls, VHL knockout kidneys are smaller and developmentally delayed by postnatal day 1, and have about half the number of glomeruli at postnatal day 21. VHL knockout nephron progenitors also exhibit persistent Six2 and Wt1 expression, as well as decreased mitochondrial respiration and prolonged reliance on glycolysis.ConclusionsOur findings identify a novel role for VHL in mediating nephron progenitor differentiation through metabolic regulation, and suggest that VHL is required for normal kidney development.

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Abstract Hematopoiesis in adult animals is maintained by a small population of clonogenic, multipotent hematopoietic stem cells (HSC), which maintain throughout life the capacity to self-renew and to differentiate to give rise to progeny cells that ultimately generate all lineages of mature blood cells. In adult mice and humans, the majority of HSC are found in the bone marrow (BM); however, HSC are also constitutively present at low levels in the circulation. The frequency of HSC in the blood can be significantly increased through the use of “mobilizing” agents, including cytotoxic drugs and/or cytokines, which often act both to drive HSC proliferation and to induce HSC migration from the BM into the bloodstream. Yet despite the increasingly common clinical exploitation of HSC in bone marrow and mobilized peripheral blood progenitor cell transplantation, both the evolutionary rationale and the molecular mechanisms that underlie the remarkable migratory capacity of HSC remain largely unknown. Therefore, to begin to elucidate the mechanisms and regulators of these events, we have used parabiotic and transplantation models to characterize normal blood-borne HSC. Our data clearly demonstrate that HSC are constitutively present in the blood of untreated mice and maintain a cell surface phenotype in the blood highly similar to their BM counterparts. Blood-borne HSC in normal mice can engraft both irradiated and non-irradiated BM niches, and subsequently are phenotypically and functionally indistinguishable from endogenous, host-type cells. These data suggest that BM homing of transplanted HSC in irradiated recipients and HSC mobilization in cytokine-treated animals likely makes use of pre-existing pathways that support the constitutive recirculation of these cells in normal animals. Finally, to extend these data and begin to uncover factors likely to play a role in stimulating HSC migration in both normal and mobilized mice, we have employed cDNA microarray technology to compare global gene expression profiles of normal and pre-migratory BM HSC, and have thus identified multiple candidate genes, including cell cycle regulators, signaling molecules, and transcription factors, that may be involved in HSC expansion or in HSC retention in and/or egress from the BM. Taken together, these findings provide significant insight into the dynamic nature and function of HSC, and may ultimately suggest novel and improved strategies for clinical hematopoietic cell transplantation.

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While a more accurate appraisal of Mary Tudor’s life and reign is underway, historians of literature continue either to ignore or to misinterpret surviving representations of Princess Mary. To begin correcting this failure, the article analyzes a complex 1525 verse portrait of Mary, setting that text within its contemporary political contexts. Analysis of William Newman’s unpublished manuscript poem, “My ladie princesse doughter to king harry the VIII,” recovers an intriguing characterization of the first Tudor princess in the period immediately prior to Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and frustrates attempts to understand the first Tudor queen as a lifelong loser destined to failure by her own limited abilities. Newman’s long poem represents the princess as uniquely qualified and admirably prepared to rule England as Henry’s heir. Bien qu’une réévaluation de la vie et du règne de Marie Tudor soit en cours, les historiens de la littérature continuent d’ignorer ou de mal interpréter les représentations de la princesse Marie qui nous sont parvenues. Afin de contribuer à corriger cette lacune, cet article analyse un portrait littéraire complexe de Marie, long de 1525 vers, et le situe dans son contexte politique. L’analyse du poème manuscrit et inédit de William Newman, intitulé « My ladie princesse doughter to king harry the VIII », présente une intéressante description de la première princesse Tudor, durant la période précédant immédiatement le divorce d’Henri VIII et de Catherine d’Aragon ; ce choix chronologique empêche de considérer la première reine Tudor comme une perdante, que ses compétences limitées destinent à l’échec. Le long poème de Newman représente en effet la princesse comme l’héritière d’Henri VIII, exceptionnellement compétente et parfaitement préparée à diriger l’Angleterre.

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Abstract Hemophilia A and B are bleeding disorders that result from functional deficiencies in specific circulating blood clotting factors termed factor VIII (FVIII) and factor IX (FIX), respectively, and collectively display an incidence of 1 in 4000 male births. Stem cell transplantation therapies hold the promise of providing a cure for hemophilia, but currently available transplantable stem cell products do not confer endogenous FIX or FVIII biosynthesis. For this reason, stem cell–based approaches for hemophilia have focused primarily on genetic engineering of pluripotent or multipotent stem cells. While pluripotent stem cells have been branded with high expectation and promise, they remain poorly characterized in terms of clinical utility and safety. In contrast, adult-lineage-restricted stem cells are established agents in the clinical armamentarium. Of the clinically established stem cell types, hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are the most utilized and represent the standard of care for several genetic and acquired diseases. Furthermore, HSCs are ideal cellular vehicles for gene therapy applications because they self-renew, repopulate the entire blood lineage while concurrently amplifying the transgene copy number >106 fold, and also have direct access to the bloodstream. Current research on HSC transplantation gene therapy approaches for hemophilia A and B is focused on the following: (1) identification of safe and efficient methods of nucleic acid transfer, (2) optimization of transgene product expression, (3) minimization of conditioning-regimen-related toxicity while maintaining HSC engraftment, and (4) overcoming preexisting immunity. Based on the existing data and current rate of progress, clinical trials of HSC transplantation gene therapy for hemophilia are predicted to begin in the coming years.

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Cet article introduit l’hypothèse de l’oppression nécropolitique des sans-abris. Nous partons d’une analyse métaphorologique de propos tenus par les sans-abris sur leurs conditions d’existence, souvent décrites comme impliquant l’expérience vécue paradoxale d’une indifférenciation tendancielle entre la vie et la mort. Nous essayons de conceptualiser le contenu de ces descriptions en faisant appel au concept de nécropolitique développé par Norman Ajari dans le contexte des études critiques de la race. La nécropolitique sera comprise ici comme un idéal-type de gouvernance de la vie ne se réduisant ni à la biopolitique (soin de la vie de certaines populations), ni à la thanatopolitique (l’extermination de populations jugées indésirables), mais visant plutôt à brouiller les frontières qui séparent la mort de la vie. La nécropolitique est ce qui rend la vie quotidienne des sans-abris proprement invivable, aboutissant à cette vie vécue sous forme-de-mort dont font état les témoignages de certaines personnes sans-abri.This article introduces the hypothesis of the necropolitical oppression of the homeless. We begin with a metaphorological analysis of the discourses held by certain homeless persons regarding their conditions of existence, often described as involving the paradoxical experience of a tendential undifferentiation of life and death. We then build on the concept of necropolitics elaborated by Norman Ajari in the context of critical race theory. Necropolitics will be understood here as an ideal-type of the governance of life reducible neither to biopolitics (caring for the life of certain populations) nor to thanatopolitics (extermination of undesirable populations). Instead, the rationality of necropolitics as a form of oppression consists in constantly blurring the frontiers of life and death. In the case of the homeless, necropolitics is rendering their everyday life literally unlivable, an experience reflected in the analyzed testimonies of homeless persons.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the link between public education policies and institutional practices in Argentina throughout history and today. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology used is in line with socio-educational management studies oriented to analyse educational practices qualitatively from an institutional perspective. Findings – The review allows a wider discussion about the characteristics of the traditional organizational structure in relation to the rules, order, purposes and hom*ogeneity of educational institutions. Furthermore, the paper shows there are some experiences and practices developed nowadays in Argentinian secondary schools that constitute a guide for social inclusion. Research limitations/implications – Throughout Argentina’s education history, secondary school has supported its policies on a bureaucratic institutional structure rationally oriented to serving interests of a minority. Today, social inclusion policies and compulsory secondary schooling are presented as an opportunity to democratize the management of educational institutions. Practical implications – In the early 2000s, the education system in Argentina kept a traditional bureaucratic structure based on a selective education policy. In this regard, statistics are quite revealing as regards the degree of social exclusion in secondary school: only 11 per cent of the students that begin first grade, finish secondary school. In 2006, after the enactment of the compulsory secondary education law, educational management is faced with the challenge to renew its institutional practices in order to make inclusion feasible. In this sense, the paper shows that secondary schools are implementing certain management practices aimed at achieving greater social inclusion. Originality/value – The paper focuses on the notion that the characteristics of management practices are related to the social interests of education policies. In this sense, the educational management of Argentinian secondary schools is undergoing a process of transformation from traditional selective practices towards more inclusive practices.

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Abstract At any given time, only a very small fraction of the hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in an organism are actively dividing; the vast majority of these cells remain in a quiescent state. HSCs can escape this quiescent state to self-renew and give rise to progenitor cells (HPCs), which expand rapidly to form all of the mature progeny cells of the lympho-hematopoietic system. Despite the centrality of quiescence in hematopoiesis, the mechanisms by which quiescence is regulated are largely unknown. Several studies have shown that p21CIP/WAF1 is required for cell cycle arrest of HSCs, and deletion of p21 results in an increase in HSC pool size. However, little is known about the pathways upstream of p21. Recently, we identified 81 genes that were highly over-expressed by normal HSC-enriched CD34+/CD38− cells compared to HPC-enriched CD34+/CD38+ cells. One of the HSC-over-expressed genes was Krupple-Like Factor 4 (KLF4), a member of the Kruppel-like transcription factor family. KLF4 has been associated with a quiescent phenotype in T and B lymphocytes, and exogenous expression of KLF4 induces growth arrest in a colon cancer cell line. It has been shown that KLF4 is an important mediator of p21 in the G1/S cell cycle arrest following DNA damage. Thus, we hypothesized that KLF4 is an important upstream regulator of HSPC quiescence via p21. To begin to test this, we designed a dual promoter self-inactivating (SIN) lentiviral vector that expressed KLF4 under the control of the EF1α promoter and GFP under the CMV promoter. We transduced primary mouse bone marrow (BM) Lin− or human cord blood (CB) CD34+ HSPCs, and purified the resulting successfully transduced GFP+ cells by fluorescence-activated cell sorting. KLF4-transduced human or mouse HPCs displayed a major reduction in colony forming capacity, as compared to either GFP− HPCs transduced with the vector containing KLF4 and GFP or HPCs transduced with the parental control vector expressing only GFP (Fig 1 shows representative experiments). In suspension cultures, KLF4-transduced cell populations generated fewer total cells, accompanied by an increase in apoptic/necrotic cells. In the KLF4-transduced cells, a higher percent were CD34+. These results are consistent with KLF4 inhibiting HPC differentiation and inducing a p21-like pathway with cell cycle arrest and increased apoptosis. Further investigation of KLF4 cellular and molecular actions may not only lead to enhanced understanding of the molecular basis of HSPC quiescence, but also to novel methods for expansion of normal HSPCs. Figure Figure

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Abstract Lifelong production of blood by hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPC) depends on stem cells self-renewal and their maintenance by bone marrow (BM) microenvironment. BM chemotherapy or whole body irradiation frequently causes hematological abnormalities in cancer patients. HSC within the BM exhibit quiescent state with low mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) and hyperpolarizing membrane potential, however upon stress hematopoiesis HSC exit quiescence and either self-renew or differentiate in mature cells. Understanding the mechanism controlling hematopoiesis regeneration upon replicative stress is expected to provide molecular targets for amelioration of chemotherapy induced toxicity. Mitochondria recognize and respond to many stresses by modifying mitochondrial dynamics and macroscopic autophagy (mitophagy), and maintains HSC function both at intrinsic and extrinsic level (Ho et al., Nature 2017). Upon myeloablative stress, hematopoietic Connexin 43 (H-Cx43) preserves HSPC survival and efficient blood formation by transfer of damaging excess ROS to BM stromal cells (BMSC), preventing HSC apoptosis and lethal hematology failure (Taniguchi-Ishikwawa E et al., PNAS 2012), and its intermediate C-loop domain has been shown to act as negative regulator of the beclin complex of microautophagy (Eloy Bejarano et al, Nat Cell Biol. 2014). Since HSC apoptosis depends on mitochondrial activation and mitochondrial homeostasis is maintained by coordinated regulation of mitochondrial fission/fusion and mitophagy, we hypothesized that mitochondrial Cx43 may exert a cell-autonomous activity over the mitochondrial turnover upon cell division in the regeneration phase after myelotoxic chemotherapy. To analyze the role of Cx43 in HSC mitochondrial dynamics and fate, we created HSC mitochondrial reporter mice by crossing Cox8 mitochondrial signal localization peptide-Dendra2 fusion protein transgenic (mito-Dendra2) mice with Vav-Cre; Cx43f/f (H-Cx43Δ/Δ)mice. While quiescent Cx43Δ/Δ HSC do not demonstrate any major phenotype, snapshot high resolution microscopy demonstrated that Cx43 deficiency enhances mitochondrial superoxide levels, depolarizes membrane potential and results in larger mitochondria accumulation (~2 fold) after forced division of HSC. In addition, time lapsed cinematography of red-fluorescent, photo-converted mito-Dendra2 demonstrated that Cx43-deficient mitochondria in cycling HSC split into multiple smaller fragments. Phosphorylation of Drp1 (Ser616) and its accumulation with mitochondria is higher in dividing Cx43Δ/ΔHSC, suggesting that Cx43 is a negative regulator of mitochondrial fission and its deficiency facilitates mitochondrial fragmentation. Inhibition of mitochondrial fission with overexpression of the dominant-negative Drp1 mutant (K38A) or the Drp1 inhibitor Mdivi1 prevents the effect of Cx43 deficiency on mitochondrial hyper-fragmentation. The fate of the smaller fragments is mitophagy as demonstrated by increased co-localization of Cx43 deficient mitochondria with the ubiquitin kinase Pink1, the autophagy reporter's p62 and LC3 punctae, and the lysosomal membrane proteins Lamp1/2 in HSC. Genetic silencing of Atg7 or addition of the autophagolysosome inhibitor bafilomycin A1 to dividing HSC prevents the induction of mitophagy in dividing Cx43Δ/Δ HSC. Overexpression of structure-function mutants in Cx43Δ/Δ HSC (Cys-less, with 6 point mutations in Cysteine residues replaced by Alanine, resulting in impaired hemichannel docking or the truncated C-terminus mutant D257 resulting in impaired signaling and intramolecular interactions needed for channel gating) demonstrated that both the formation of whole intercellular channel and the presence of C-terminus once Cx43 channel formed are indispensable for the negative regulatory role of Cx43 on mitophagy. Our results thus identify gap junction protein Cx43 as an important regulator of mitochondrial fission and mitophagy in dividing HSC which may be a target for preservation of hematopoietic stem cell regenerative capacity. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

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Abstract Abstract SCI-34 The cellular and molecular basis for the heterogeneity that exists within the individual cells that make up a tumour is not well understood. There is clear evidence from the historical literature of human experimentation, the vast majority of leukemia blasts are post-mitotic and generated from a rapidly proliferating fraction of <5% of total leukemic blasts. These same studies also established that a rare subfraction of blasts were quiescent and only entered cell cycle in the order of weeks or months. The cancer stem cell (CSC) model postulates that such heterogeneity arises because the tumour is organized as a cellular hierarchy sustained by a CSC at the apex. If a tumour is hom*ogeneous the CSC model would not apply. By employing the principles of stem cell biology, first worked out in hematopoiesis, of clonal assays and prospective cell purification, there is solid evidence that human AML follows a CSC model. LSCs are the only AML cells capable of self-renewal while still generating rapidly proliferating progenitors and terminal leukemic blasts. Our studies have also demonstrated that LSCs are not functionally hom*ogeneous but, like the normal hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) compartment, comprised of distinct hierarchically arranged LSC classes. Distinct LSC fates derive from heterogeneous self-renewal potential. Finally, many LSC appear to be quiescent. Thus, the AML clone is organized as a hierarchy that originates from LSC, which produce AML-CFU and leukemic blasts. AML is organized as a cellular hierarchy sustained by LSCs at their apex. The rare occurrence, generally dormant nature, and abnormal apoptotic response of LSCs are all properties that may render them resistant to conventional chemotherapeutics that target proliferating cells. In addition, minimal residual disease occurrence and poor survival have been attributed to high LSC frequency at time of diagnosis in AML patients. Although there are a number of well known problems with xenotransplant assays, recent improvements to this model have been employed to assess both the frequency of LSC in a cross section of AML samples as well as the nature of the cell surface phenotype of the LSC. Collectively this research has shown that the LSC frequency can vary over many orders of magnitude from 1% to <1 per 106, with some genetic AML subtypes such as MLL leukemias possessing the highest LSC frequency. Thus even with the most optimized assay system they represent a rare subfraction of AML blasts for most forms of leukemia. The properties of AML-LSC make them especially resistant to standard cytoablative therapeutics, so LSC-targeted therapies are clearly needed to improve long term survival for this dismal disease. A number of new therapeutics are being developed and evaluated in the xenotransplant assays and several are now moving into clinical trial. With translation of lab-based research into the clinic, the next several years will begin to provide definitive answers to the most vexing question the continues to surround the whole field of cancer stem cells: while the importance of CSC are clearly seen in numerous xenotransplant models of leukemic and solid tumours, how relevant are they in the human disease? Dick JE. Stem cell concepts renew cancer research. Blood 2008;112:4793-807. Disclosures Dick: Roche: Research Funding; CSL Ltd: Research Funding.

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A Tecnologia de Comunicação Digital vem se inserindo de forma crescente no cotidiano escolar, com isso, surge a necessidade de discutir sobre os materiais didáticos digitais que estão sendo elaborados, selecionados e apresentados aos estudantes, chamados neste trabalho de Objetos Digitais de Aprendência. Frente a isso, o intuito principal deste artigo é refletir sobre os Objetos Digitais de Aprendência procurando considerá-los como gênero do discurso. Apresentando o conceito, a função, os aspectos e características importantes no momento de elaborar ou selecionar um Objeto digital. As bases teóricas deste estudo fundamentam-se à luz da teoria dos gêneros do discurso de Bakhtin e outros autores que discutem sobre os Objetos Digitais de Aprendência e do momento da Cibercultura que estamos vivenciando. Referências:BAKHTIN, Mikhail. Estética da Criação Verbal. 4. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.BRONCKART, Jean-Paul. Atividade de linguagem, textos e discursos: por um interacionismo sócio-discursivo. Trad. Anna Maria Machado, Péricles Cunha. São Paulo: EDUC, 2003.COMARELLA, Rafaela Lunardi. Gênesis - gestão de objetos digitais de ensino-aprendizagem: construindo um modelo. Tese (Doutorado em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento). Florianópolis: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento, 2015.CASTELLS, Manuel; CARDOSO, Gustavo (Orgs.). A Sociedade em Rede: do conhecimento à ação política; Conferência. Belém (Por): Imprensa Nacional, 2005.CATAPAN, Araci Hack. Tertium: o novo modo do ser, do saber e do apreender: Construindo uma Taxionomia para Mediação Pedagógica em Tecnologia de Comunicação Digital. Tese (Doutorado em Mídia e Conhecimento). Florianópolis: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produção, 2001.DAL MOLIN, Beatriz Helena. Do Tear à Tela: uma tessitura de linguagens e sentidos para o processo de aprendência. Florianópolis, 2003, 237 f. Tese (Doutorado em Engenharia de Produção), Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produção, UFSC, Florianópolis – SC, 2003.______. Mapa referencial para construção de material didático para o Programa e-Tec Brasil [et al.] – Florianópolis: UFSC, 2008.GRANETTO, Julia Cristina. XANADU: Hipertextualidade, Objetos Digitais De Ensino-Aprendizagem em Língua Espanhola, Formação Continuada dos Professores – Interfaces, 2014, 119 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Letras), Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras, UNIOESTE, Cascavel – PR, 2014.LÉVY, Pierre. A inteligência coletiva: por uma antropologia no ciberespaço. 3ª.Edição. São Paulo: Editora Loyola, 1999.______. As tecnologias da inteligência. Rio de Janeiro: Editora. 34, 2004.MOTTER, Rose Maria Belim. MY WAY: um método para o ensino-aprendizagem para língua inglesa. 2013. 281f. Tese. (Doutorado em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento), Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento, UFSC, Florianópolis - SC, 2013.NEVEN, F; DUVAL, E. Reusable learning objects: a survey of LOM-based Repositories. In: ACM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMEDIA, Juan-les-Pins. Proceedings: ACM, 2002.RODRIGUES, Rosângela Hammes. PEREIRA, Rodrigo Acosta. Perspectivas atuais sobre gêneros do discurso no campo da lingüística. Revista Eletrônica de Divulgação Científica em Língua Portuguesa, Lingüística e Literatura. Ano 05 n.11 - 2º Semestre de 2009.RONCARELLI, Dóris. ÁGORA: concepção e organização de uma taxionomia para análise e avaliação de Objetos Digitais de Ensino-Aprendizagem. Florianópolis, 2012, 288 f. Tese (Doutorado em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento), Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento, UFSC, Florianópolis – SC, 2012.SILVA, Lúcia. Edna; CAFÉ, Lígia; CATAPAN, Araci. Hack. Os objetos educacionais, os metadados e os repositórios na sociedade da informação. In: Ciência da informação. Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia.v. 1, n. 1 (1972) – Brasília, 1972. Ci, Inf. Brasília, DF, v. 39 n. 3, p. 93-104, set./dez. 2010.XAVIER, Antonio Carlos dos Santos. Letramento digital e ensino. In: Carmi Ferraz Santos e Márcia Mendonça. (Org.). Alfabetização e Letramento: conceitos e relações. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2005. p. 133-148. Disponível em: http://www.ufpe.br/nehte/artigos/Letramento%20digital%20e%20ensino.pdfWILEY, D. A. Connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: A definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy. 2000. Disponível em: http://www.reusability.org/read/. Recebido em 27-12-2018.Aceito em 26-03-2019.

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Mais um Passo para a Indexação da Revista da SPDV em 2018After 2 full years of publication with the new editorial board, 2017 was the year of big changes for the SPDV journal, which we hope will allow the indexation of our journal in the Medline.We had regular and timely publications, each number with an editorial related to one of the main articles published in that number, a continuous medical education (CME) article, followed by 6 articles with original data or review articles on the latest news on dermatology, 6-7 clinical cases, a quiz/what’s your diagnosis presentation taking profit of clinical and histological images and letters to the editors. This format will continue in 2018 to have a more regular type of articles in our journal.2017 was the year of internationalization. Apart from regular Brazilian clinical cases that we really appreciate as most bring new aspects from diseases that are seldom seen among us, we had a CME article on pruritus written by our colleague Manuel Pereira from Germany that with Sonja Ständer and the Munster team is coordinating European studies on pruritus and chronic prurigo, and an editorial written in collaboration with An Goossens the well-known teacher in contact and photocontact allergy from Leuven, Belgium. We are still expecting that our residents or specialists who stay a few months abroad in highly specialized centres with scholarships from the SPDV write review articles in collaboration with the doctors they worked with abroad.This year we began the process of identifying the papers published in our Journal with a DOI (digital object identifier), a direct link to the manuscript that includes the number given to our Journal followed by its initials, the volume and number of each journal and the consecutive number attributed by the webpage to each article that is submitted (ex. https://dx.doi.org/10.29021/spdv.76.2.849). Therefore online submission of all the manuscripts is mandatory. But this is an easy process and allows the authors to trace the state of their manuscripts while in review.It is also our intention in 2018 to begin the process of showing the articles online as soon as they are accepted, before their inclusion on the printed and finally composed volume. We hope to have the collaboration of Dr. José Carvalho who is thoroughly taking care of our webpage. Thanks to the work of the editorial board and the many invited reviewers* and with a more thorough reviewing process we improved the quality of the papers that we received, although many of them were already of really high standard.Happily this year more original and review articles were submitted (33) of which only 2 were rejected (6%). The rejection rate was much higher within the 75 clinical reports received (38% – 51%). Although some articles submitted in 2017 are still under review the overall rejection rate was around 36%.With the final review of Drª Helena Donato there is a good standardization of procedures, including a critical review of the references, MeSH words and inclusion of all the missing details in the manuscripts to fulfil the international standards for publication of scientific papers. The work of our Editor, Gabriela Marques Pinto, who also makes a final review of all the manuscripts and prepares their composition for printing is also an enormous job.It is our intention to renew the editorial board during 2018 to include other colleagues that have given a significant and timely contribution to our journal, but we will keep the contribution of Dr Helena Donato and her knowledge to submit the journal for indexation with the next number of 2018.Still, to keep with international rules of scientific journals, in 2018 we will change the placing of publicity within the printed journal to avoid its inclusion in the middle of scientific papers.With these changes and improvements we are feeling more confident and on a much better position to achieve indexation of the Revista da SPDV at the Medline. With the contribution of this team and all the dermatologists we hope a favourable decision, but this will be just one step forward as we will certainly keep on improving the Journal of Portuguese-speaking dermatologists.

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Abstract Cell death pathways are desired targets of small molecule inhibitors since their deregulation plays an important role in chemotherapy resistance. Obatoclax binds to the BH3 pocket of anti-apoptotic BCL-2 family proteins, inhibiting their interactions with pro-apoptotic BCL-2 family members. Before we found potent obatoclax activity in MLL/AF4+ cell lines and 6 MLL rearranged (MLL+) leukemias. In apoptosis assays of the cell lines obatoclax increases TUNEL staining but minimally activates caspase 3 (Rege ASH 2005; Zhang AACR 2007). In this study, we tested the cytotoxicity of obatoclax in additional MLL+ leukemias and investigated its mechanism of action with a focus on autophagy (ATG), since ATG proteins such as beclin 1 also interact with anti-apoptotic BCL-2 family members. Methods: MLL partner genes were determined by molecular/cytogenetic methods. 17 primary MLL+ leukemias including the original 6 (12 ALL/11 infants, 1 child; 3 AML/1 each infant, child, adolescent; 2 bilineal/2 infants) were tested in MTT assays after 72 h obatoclax exposures. MTT assays on cytotoxic drug-obatoclax combinations were performed in a primary MLL/AF4+ ALL and interactions were studied by response surface modeling. MCL-1/BAK complex inhibition was tested in this ALL by co-IP/immunoblot analysis. Cell death and ATG were studied in obatoclax treated RS4:11 and/or SEM-K2 cells by PI flow, LC3 and p62 Western blot analysis and EM, using doxorubicin as a control for apoptosis. Gene expression changes after vehicle treatment vs. obatoclax treatment at the IC50 and IC90 for 6 h were studied using Affymetrix HG_U133 Plus2.0 arrays. Differentially expressed genes overall and those specifically associated with ATG were queried by ANOVA (p&lt;0.01, ≥50% change in mean expression considered as significant). Q-RT PCR analysis of basal expression levels of select ATG genes (BECN1, WIPI1, MAP1LC3B) was performed in 10 of the 17 primary cases and correlations with the IC50 values were determined using Pearson correlation coefficients and their levels of significance. Changes in the expression patterns of these genes after vehicle treatment vs. treatment with obatoclax at the IC50 for 6 h and 48 h were compared in 6 cases by Q-RT PCR and cluster analysis. Results: MLL partner genes were AF4, ENL and other in 6, 5 and 1 ALL, respectively; AF9 in 2 and AF6 in 1 AML; and AF4 and ENL in 1 each bilineal leukemia. The single agent IC50’s of obatoclax suggested greater sensitivity in ALL (13–834 nM; median 104 nM) than AML (243–488nM; median 341 nM), and were 79 nM and 508 nM in the bilineal leukemias. In addition to synergy with ARAC, ADR, VP16 and DEX (Zhang AACR 2007) there was synergy with LASP and VCR in the primary MLL/AF4+ ALL. In the same ALL obatoclax decreased MCL-1/BAK dimers, suggesting interaction with the MCL-1 target, and obatoclax increased high molecular weight MCL-1/BAK complexes and decreased MCL-1, the latter of which would also decrease MCL-1/BAK dimers. Obatoclax treatment of RS4:11 and SEM-K2 cells increased PI staining and LC-3I to LC-3II conversion; EM analysis of SEM-K2 cells revealed phagophores, autophagosomes and autophagolysosomes indicative of ATG induction. Lack of p62 accumulation showed that ATG was not blocked. EM findings of apoptosis occurred in SEM-K2 cells after doxorubicin exposure. ATG was not the most affected pathway in microarray analyses of obatoclax treated SEM-K2 and RS4:11 cells, but specific analysis of ATG-related genes showed WIPI1 and MAP1LC3B upregulation. Moreover, the basal expression of BECN1 was positively correlated with obatoclax activity in the 10 primary cases (r =0.659; p=0.038), which is consistent with importance of this pathway in the drug response. ATG gene expression analysis in obatoclax treated primary MLL+ cases identified 2 patient clusters; in one cluster obatoclax decreased BECN1 and increased WIPI1 expression; in the other ATG gene expression changes were more variable. Conclusions: Obatoclax induces cell death in MLL+ leukemias via the ATG pathway even though they are apoptosis competent. This is distinct from the apoptosis activation in other cancer cell types and indicates that the targets of obatoclax are disease-specific. The activity in a broad spectrum of MLL+ leukemias indicates that obatoclax is a promising molecularly targeted agent for this population.

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Background. The modernist dramaturgy of Fernand Crommelynck allows some literary critics to attribute it to symbolism: continuing the symbolist traditions, the author builds his works “on the development of an abstract position, personified by dramatic characters that can be perceived both as living people and as figurative designations of concepts” [8]. Other researchers believe that the F. Crommelynck’s works are expressionistic, since the Crommelynck Theater is “poetic, but full of pathos, hyperbolized images, in the characteristics of his personages exaggeration is brought to the point of absurdity” [2]. Some scientists attribute Crommelynck to surrealism because the playwright is one of the burlesque theater renovators [3]. At the same time, there is an opinion that a number of later plays by the playwright anticipate the aesthetics of the theater of the absurd [11]. Ambiguously critics evaluate the genre features of Crommelynck’s plays. They are also interpreted as “psychological dramas that combine farce and tragedy”, therefore “the characters of Crommelynck’s plays are tragic jesters, the embodiment of the “eternal” principles of love, jealousy, and stinginess. His highlight is human passions, paradoxes, absurdity” [15]. His pieces are considered and as varieties of drama filled with elements of the grotesque, and “characters often act as personifications of certain moral qualities: jealousy (“Le Cocu magnifique” – “The Magnanimous Cuckold”), stinginess (“Tripes d’or” – “The Golden Womb”), played out virtues (“Carine, ou la jeune fille folle de son &#226;me” –“Carine, or the Mad Girl of self soul”)”, etc. [11]. Neither Vsevolod Meyerhold (production of the play “The Magnanimous Cuckold” in 1922), nor Les Kurbas (production of the play “The Golden Womb” in 1926), who were innovators in theatrical field, revolutionists of the Soviet theater, could not pass by the creativity of the contemporary modernist playwright. The purpose of this study is to identify the peculiarities of the Crommelynck’ dramas produced by stage directors and the lines of the pioneering searches of two great representatives of the theater went when staging Crommelynck’s plays. Methods. The basis of the research methodology is historical analysis. Results. Meyerhold, as shown by his notes and the memoirs of his contemporaries, moved in the 1920s in his theatrical searches went towards formalist experiments, in particular, constructivism and biomechanics. According to the director, the Crommelynck’ grotesque-farcical play “The Magnanimous Cuckold” on the theater stage, saturated with complex diverse physical movements of the actors, was supposed to show one of the workers’ leisure activities. Les Kurbas, also seeking to radically renew the Ukrainian stage, relied on a completely different theatrical concept. Speaking for an active-revolutionary life installation, for the restructuring of social psychology and, consequently, for spiritual and moral values, Kurbas in his articles and conversations called for fighting the limited outlook of the Nepmen and provincial inhabitants who only think about endless prosperity [9; 10]. Realizing his concept in life, it is not by chance that the director chooses for the premiere of the first season of “Berezil” in Kharkov the play “Tripes d’or” (“The Golden Womb”) just written by Crommelynck (1925). Note that “Tripes d’or” in its content is much more complicated than the “Le Cocu magnifique”. In our opinion, the playwright, using allusions to the work of European prose writers of the XIX century, seeks to show that even an honest and decent person, becoming the owner of a large inheritance, will begin to degrade morally; gold, sooner or later, will become a fetish. Moreover, in “Tripes d’or” it is quite clearly shown that the uncle of Pierre-Auguste himself (the hero of the piece) – AnnaRomainHormidas deGutem– passed through the temptation of wealth. Hormidas’ niece Melina, who eventually got the “throne” with a pottery filled with gold dust, will also pass along this path. In addition, Crommelynck in his play reveals a number of stages of Pierre-Auguste’s painful struggle with the attractive power of gold: from understanding that gold will soon turn into a dragon that will kill a knight, through the realization that “gold in itself is fascinating”, to recognition: “I want to destroy everything ... what is near money .. so that there is no – neither the past, nor the present, nor the future ...” [7: 149, 160]. At the same time, the author in a number of scenes departs from the tragic pathos and appeals to the grotesque, which allows in the “Tripes d’or” to organically combine the real and the fantastic. Thoughtfully approaching the text of the play, Kurbas saw in its plot not the single tragedy of Pierre-Auguste, on which a huge inheritance had suddenly fallen, but a rather common phenomenon in the world of ordinary people thinking only of profit. Therefore, the director chooses not a psychological disclosure of characters, but a grotesque beginning, which allows exposing the thinking of the Nepmen and bourgeois living in petty, personal interests. The original design of the play “The Golden Womb”, semi-grotesque and half-realistic costumes of the actors, their playing and characters’ associations with animals to clarify the understanding of the stage images – all this, on the one hand, exposes the mercantile consciousness of the modern tradesman, on the other – discloses the original approach of the director to modernist text. Conclusions. By turning to modernist dramaturgy and relying on the modern possibilities of the avant-garde theater, both outstanding directors created original productions. If Meyerhold, during this period, was interested in formal experiments and revealing the possibilities of constructivism and biomechanics, so for Kurbas, who was also interested of constructivism, nevertheless, other tasks came to the fore. It was necessary for him to bring up a new theater audience in a short time: to change philistine psychology demonstrating new horizons for the development of public life and the wide possibilities of man in it. It is evidently, that the analysis of the new European dramaturgy and new experiments in the Soviet theater of the 1920–1930s is not limited to what has been said, and further careful study of these problems is required.

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e4195117This essay aims to problematize the relationship between work condition and professional insertion, considering that the elements that constitute teaching work conditions can have a negative impact on professional development, needing to be taken into account when investigating the phenomenon of evasion and career abandonment, especially by beginning teachers. Assuming that the career is a process of marking and incorporating individuals into the institutionalized practices and routines of the work teams, which depends on positive conditions to consolidate and that it is through the structuring of the career that the objective conditions of the teaching work are manifested, some elements that make up the teaching career considered in this essay, are considered fundamental for the understanding of professional development: a) forms of hiring, b) working hours, c) the number of students per class and classes and of schools in which the beginning teacher teaches, d) the training times and the spaces offered by the institutions, e) the support offered to these professionals. We argue that any analysis that is intended to be made on the professional insertion in the teaching career needs to contemplate the innumerable cleavages that directly affect labor relations and that further intensify the difficulties faced by those who begin to exercise teaching work.ResumoEste ensaio tem como objetivo problematizar a relação entre condição de trabalho e inserção profissional, considerando que os elementos que constituem as condições de trabalho docente podem repercutir negativamente no desenvolvimento profissional, necessitando serem levados em consideração quando se investiga o fenômeno da evasão e do abandono da carreira, em especial pelos professores iniciantes. Partindo do princípio de que a carreira é um processo de marcação e de incorporação dos indivíduos às práticas e rotinas institucionalizadas das equipes de trabalho, que depende de condições positivas para se consolidar e que é por meio da estruturação da carreira que se manifestam as condições objetivas do trabalho docente, são apontados neste ensaio alguns elementos que compõem a carreira docente, considerados fundantes para a compreensão do desenvolvimento profissional: a) as formas de contratação, b) as jornadas de trabalho, c) o número de alunos por turma, de turmas e de escolas em que o professor iniciante leciona, d) os tempos e espaços de formação ofertados pelas instituições, e) os apoios ofertados a esses profissionais. Defendemos que qualquer análise que se pretenda fazer sobre a inserção profissional na carreira docente precisa contemplar as inúmeras clivagens que incidem diretamente nas relações de trabalho e que adensam ainda mais as dificuldades enfrentadas pelos que começam a exercer o trabalho docente.Palavras-chave: Condições de trabalho, Inserção à docência, Professor iniciante.Keywords: Working conditions, Teaching induction, Beginning teacher.ReferencesBLOMMAERT, Jan. Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes: chronicles of complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2013. 144 p.BRASIL. [Constituição (1988)]. Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil de 1988. Brasília, DF: Presidência da República, [2016]. Disponível em: http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Constituicao/ Constituicao.htm. Acesso em: 1 jan. 2017.BRASIL. Lei nº 11.738, de 16 de Julho de 2008. Regulamenta a alínea “e” o inciso III do caput do art. 60 do Ato das Disposições Constitucionais Transitórias, para instituir o piso salarial profissional nacional para os profissionais do magistério público da educação básica. Diário Oficial da União, Poder Legislativo, Brasília, DF, 17 jul. 2008. p. 1. Disponível em: <http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2007-2010/2008/lei/l11738.htm>. Acesso em: 12 out. 2015.CASTEL, Robert. As metamorfoses da questão social: uma crônica do salário. Petropolis, RJ: Vozes, 1998. 611 p.CATANI, Denise Bárbara; BUENO, Belmira Oliveira; SOUZA, M. Cecília C.C.; SOUSA, Cynthia Pereira de (org.). Docência, memória e gênero: estudos sobre formação. São Paulo: Escrituras, 1997. 111 p.ELIAS, Norbert. A Sociedade dos indivíduos. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1994. 224 p.ELIAS, Norbert; SCOTSON, John. Os estabelecidos e os outsiders. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2000. 228 p.GATTI, Bernardete Angelina. Reconhecimento social e as políticas de carreira docente na educação básica. Cadernos de Pesquisa, São Paulo, v. 42, n. 145, p. 88-111, abr. 2012. Disponível em: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-15742012000100007. Acesso em: 07 jul. 2014.GATTI, Bernardete Angelina. Educação, escola e formação de professores: políticas e impasses. Educar em Revista, Curitiba, n. 50, p. 51-67, dez. 2013. Disponível em: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-40602013000400005&lng=pt&tlng=pt. Acesso em: 07 abr. 2020.GATTI, Bernardete Angelina; BARRETO, Elba Siqueira de Sá (coord.). Professores do Brasil: impasses e desafios. Brasília: UNESCO, 2009. E-book. Disponível em https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000184682. Acesso em: 21 nov. 2015. 285 p.GATTI, Bernadete Angelina; BARRETTO, Elba Siqueira de Sá; ANDRÉ, Marli Eliza Dalmazo de Afonso. Políticas docentes no Brasil: um estado da arte. Brasília, DF: UNESCO, 2011. E-book. Disponível em: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000212183. Acesso em: 10 ago. 2018.GOFFMAN, Erving. A representação do eu na vida cotidiana. 4. ed. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988. 231 p.GONÇALVES, José Alberto Mendonça. A carreira das professoras do ensino primário. In: NÓVOA, Antonio (org). Vida de professores. 2 ed. Porto: Porto Editora, 2013. p. 141-169.INSTITUTO PAULO MONTENEGRO. Ser professor: uma pesquisa sobre o que pensa o docente das principais capitais brasileiras. In: FUNDAÇÃO VICTOR CIVITA (São Paulo). Estudos & Pesquisas Educacionais. São Paulo: Fundação Victor Civita, 2010. p. 17-61. E-book. Disponível em: https://abrilfundacaovictorcivita.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/estudos_e_pesquisas_educacionais_vol_1.pdf. Acesso em: 07 mar. 2017.LAVAL, Christian. A escola não e? uma empresa: o neoliberalismo em ataque ao ensino público. Londrina: Planta, 2004. 324 p.LIMA, Emília Freitas de et al. Sobrevivendo ao início da carreira docente e permanecendo nela: como? por quê? o que dizem alguns estudos. Educação & Linguagem, São Paulo, v. 10, n. 15, p. 138-160, jul. 2007. Disponível em: https://www.metodista.br/revistas/revistas-ims/index.php/EL/article/view/161/171. Acesso em: 15 ago. 2015.LINHART, Danièle. Modernisation et précarisation de la vie au travail. Papeles del CEIC. [s.l.], vol. 43, p. 1-19, mar. 2009. Disponível em: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Modernisation-et-pr%C3%A9carisation-de-la-vie-au-travail-Linhart/1ce7e477f72942fae0d2d50b7b1d4938cd039c68. Acesso em: 31 maio 2018.LÜDKE, Menga; BOING, Luiz Alberto. Caminhos da profissão e da profissionalidade docentes. Educação & Sociedade, Campinas, v. 25, n. 89, p. 1159-1180, dez. 2004. Disponível em: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0101-73302004000400005&script=sci_abstract&tlng=pt. Acesso em: 25 jun. 2017.MARCELO GARCÍA, Carlos. Formação de Professores: para uma mudança educativa. Porto: Editora Porto, 1999. 271 p.MARCELO, Carlos. O professor iniciante, a prática pedagógica e o sentido da experiência. Formação Docente: Revista Brasileira de Pesquisa sobre Formação de Professores, [s.l.], v. 2, n. 3, p. 11-49, ago./dez. 2010. Disponível em: https://revformacaodocente.com.br/index.php/rbpfp/article/view/17. Acesso em: 7 jul. 2014.MARCELO, Carlos. Desenvolvimento Profissional Docente: passado e futuro. Sísifo: Revista de Ciências da Educação, Lisboa, n. 8, p. 7-22, abr. 2009. Disponível em: https://idus.us.es/bitstream/handle/11441/29247/Desenvolvimento_profissional_docente.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Acesso em: 01 abr. 2017.MEIRIEU, Philippe. Cartas a um jovem professor. Porto Alegre: Artmed, 2006. 95 p.OLIVEIRA, Dalila Andrade; ASSUNÇÃO, Ada Ávila Condições de trabalho docente. In: OLIVEIRA, Dalila Andrade; DUARTE, Adriana Cancella; VIEIRA, Lívia Fraga. Dicionário: trabalho, profissão e condição docente. Belo Horizonte: UFMG/Faculdade de Educação, 2010. on-line. Disponível em: http://gestrado.net.br/?pg=dicionario-verbetes&id=390. Acesso em: 08 ago. 2013.PEREIRA, Rodnei. O desenvolvimento profissional de um grupo de coordenadoras pedagógicas iniciantes: movimentos e indícios de aprendizagem coletiva, a partir de uma pesquisa-formação. 251 f. Tese (Doutorado em Educação: Psicologia da Educação) – Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2017.PINTO, José Marcelino Rezende. Remuneração adequada do professor: desafio à educação brasileira. Retratos da Escola, Brasília, v. 3, n. 4, p. 51-67, jun. 2009. Disponível em: http://retratosdaescola.emnuvens.com.br/rde/article/view/101/290. Acesso em: 03 abr. 2013.PRÍNCEPE, Lisandra Marisa. Condições de trabalho e Desenvolvimento profissional de professores iniciantes em uma Rede Municipal de Educação. 2017. 231 f. Tese (Doutorado em Psicologia da Educação) – Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2017.RIGOLON, Walkiria de Oliveira. O que muda quando tudo muda? Uma análise do trabalho docente dos professores alfabetizadores do Estado de São Paulo. 2013. Tese (Doutorado em Educação) – Programa de Pós-Graduação da Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, São Paulo, 2013.SAMPAIO, Maria das Merce?s Ferreira; MARIN, Alda Junqueira. Precarização do trabalho docente e seus efeitos sobre as práticas curriculares. Educação & Sociedade, [s.l.], v. 25, n. 89, p. 1203-1225, dez. 2004. Disponível em: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0101-73302004000400007&script=sci_abstract&tlng=pt. Acesso em: 19 out. 2017.SENNETT, Richard. A corrosão do caráter: consequências pessoais do trabalho do novo capitalismo. 11. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2006. 204 p.SOARES NETO, Joaquim José et al. Uma escala para medir a infraestrutura escolar. Estudos em avaliação educacional, São Paulo, v.24, n.54, p. 78-99, abr. 2013. Disponível em: http://publicacoes.fcc.org.br/ojs/index.php/eae/issue/view/163/showToc. Acesso em: 18 nov. 2016.SOUZA, Aparecida N. de. Condições de trabalho na carreira docente: comparação Brasil-França. In: SEMINÁRIO INTERNACIONAL DE LA REDESTRADO, 7., 2008, Buenos Aires. Anais eletrônicos... Buenos Aires: Redestrado, 2008. Disponível em: http://redeestrado.org/?page_id=134. Acesso em: 05 maio 2017.SOUZA, Aparecida Neri de. Relações de trabalho docente: emprego e precarização do trabalho. In: PINO, Ivany Rodrigues; ZAN, Dirce Djanira Pacheco (org.). Plano Nacional da Educação (PNE): questões desafiadoras e desafios emblemáticos. Brasília: Inep, 2013. p. 155-167.TARDIF, Maurice. A profissionalização do ensino passados trinta anos: dois passos para a frente, três para trás. Educação & Sociedade. [s.l.) 34, n. 123, 2013, p. 551-571. Disponível em http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101-73302013000200013. Acesso em 05 maio 2017.TARDIF, Maurice; RAYMOND, Danielle. Saberes, tempo e aprendizagem do trabalho no magistério. Educação & Sociedade, Campinas, v. 21, n. 73, p209-244, dez. 2000. Disponível em: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0101-73302000000400013&script=sci_abstract&tlng=pt>. Acesso em 05 maio 2017.ZARAGOSA. José Manuel Esteve. O mal-estar docente: a sala-de-aula e a saúde dos professores. Bauru: EDUSC, 1999. 175 p.

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<p>As carreiras dos professores de Chicago exibem movimentações “horizontais” entre cargos em um mesmo nível da hierarquia escolar, em termos de configuração dos problemas profissionais básicos apresentados por cada cargo, mais do que movimentações verticais entre vários desses níveis. Um grande padrão de carreira consiste em mudar-se da escola de classe baixa, onde as carreiras geralmente começam; outro padrão consiste em adaptarse, ao longo de um período de anos, aos problemas de tais escolas. Uma vez estabelecido em uma escola, o professor pode ser perturbado por mudanças relacionadas à estrutura da vizinhança ou ao pessoal administrativo com quem ele lida.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong></p><p>Carreira docente. Movimentação docente. Desigualdades socioespaciais. Relações étnico-raciais.</p><p> </p><p><strong>The career of the Chicago public schoolteacher</strong></p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>The careers of Chicago teachers exhibit “horizontal” movement among positions at one level of the school-work hierarchy in terms of the configuration of the occupation’s basic problems presented by each rather than vertical movement between several such levels. One major career pattern consists in moving from the lower-class school in which careers usually begin; another consists in adjusting, over a period of years, to the problems of such schools. Having settled in a school, the teacher may be upset by changes in neighborhood structure or in the administrative personnel with whom she deals.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong></p><p>Teaching career. Teacher movement. Socio-spatial inequalities. Ethnic-racial relations.</p>

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Abstract In the recent paper Bürgisser and Lerario (Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik (Crelles J), 2016) introduced a geometric framework for a probabilistic study of real Schubert Problems. They denoted by $$\delta _{k,n}$$ δ k , n the average number of projective k-planes in $${\mathbb {R}}\mathrm {P}^n$$ R P n that intersect $$(k+1)(n-k)$$ ( k + 1 ) ( n - k ) many random, independent and uniformly distributed linear projective subspaces of dimension $$n-k-1$$ n - k - 1 . They called $$\delta _{k,n}$$ δ k , n the expected degree of the real Grassmannian $${\mathbb {G}}(k,n)$$ G ( k , n ) and, in the case $$k=1$$ k = 1 , they proved that: $$\begin{aligned} \delta _{1,n}= \frac{8}{3\pi ^{5/2}} \cdot \left( \frac{\pi ^2}{4}\right) ^n \cdot n^{-1/2} \left( 1+{\mathcal {O}}\left( n^{-1}\right) \right) . \end{aligned}$$ δ 1 , n = 8 3 π 5 / 2 · π 2 4 n · n - 1 / 2 1 + O n - 1 . Here we generalize this result and prove that for every fixed integer $$k>0$$ k > 0 and as $$n\rightarrow \infty $$ n → ∞ , we have $$\begin{aligned} \delta _{k,n}=a_k \cdot \left( b_k\right) ^n\cdot n^{-\frac{k(k+1)}{4}}\left( 1+{\mathcal {O}}(n^{-1})\right) \end{aligned}$$ δ k , n = a k · b k n · n - k ( k + 1 ) 4 1 + O ( n - 1 ) where $$a_k$$ a k and $$b_k$$ b k are some (explicit) constants, and $$a_k$$ a k involves an interesting integral over the space of polynomials that have all real roots. For instance: $$\begin{aligned} \delta _{2,n}= \frac{9\sqrt{3}}{2048\sqrt{2\pi }} \cdot 8^n \cdot n^{-3/2} \left( 1+{\mathcal {O}}\left( n^{-1}\right) \right) . \end{aligned}$$ δ 2 , n = 9 3 2048 2 π · 8 n · n - 3 / 2 1 + O n - 1 . Moreover we prove that these numbers belong to the ring of periods intoduced by Kontsevich and Zagier and give an explicit formula for $$\delta _{1,n}$$ δ 1 , n involving a one-dimensional integral of certain combination of Elliptic functions.

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Defects of the craniofacial skeleton arise as a direct result of trauma, diseases, oncological resection, or congenital anomalies. Current treatment options are limited, highlighting the importance for developing new strategies to restore form, function, and aesthetics of missing or damaged bone in the face and the cranium. For optimal reconstruction, the goal is to replace “like with like.” With the inherent challenges of existing options, there is a clear need to develop alternative strategies to reconstruct the craniofacial skeleton. The success of mesenchymal stem cell-based approaches has been hampered by high heterogeneity of transplanted cell populations with inconsistent preclinical and clinical trial outcomes. Here, we discuss the novel characterization and isolation of mouse skeletal stem cell (SSC) populations and their response to injury, systemic disease, and how their re-activation in vivo can contribute to tissue regeneration. These studies led to the characterization of human SSCs which are able to self-renew, give rise to increasingly fate restricted progenitors, and differentiate into bone, cartilage, and bone marrow stroma, all on the clonal level in vivo without prior in vitro culture. SSCs hold great potential for implementation in craniofacial bone tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. As we begin to better understand the diversity and the nature of skeletal stem and progenitor cells, there is a tangible future whereby a subset of human adult SSCs can be readily purified from bone or activated in situ with broad potential applications in craniofacial tissue engineering.

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Paul is not interested in cosmological thinking in the proper sense of the word. This article starts by questioning the cosmological language of biblical writings. The authors of the books of the New Testament mostly use terms they found in the Septuagint – with a few remarkable exceptions. This article described how the specific term κόσμος has been used by the New Testament authors. There are two main usages of κόσμος: (1) as an anthropological term to describes mankind in its entirety; and (2) as an ecclesiological term to describes ‘the others’, that is the non-believers or the people outside the church. This is the reason why God is never called ‘the king of the world’; he is only its judge. Paulus was nie sodanig in kosmologiese denke geïnteresseerd nie. Hierdie artikel begin met ’n vraag na die kosmologiese taalgebruik van Bybelse geskrifte. Die skrywers van die Nuwe Testamentiese boeke het meestal die terme gebruik wat hulle in die Septuaginta gevind het − met ’n paar merkwaardige uitsonderings. Hierdie artikel verduidelik hoe die term κόσμος deur Nuwe Testamentiese skrywers gebruik is. Twee hoofgebruike van κόσμος word genoem: (1) as ’n antropologiese term om die totale mensdom te beskryf; en (2) as ’n ekklesiologiese term om ‘die ander’, naamlik die nie-gelowiges of die buitekerklikes, te beskryf. Dit is die rede waarom God nooit ‘die koning van die wêreld’ genoem word nie; Hy is slegs die regter daarvan.

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Abstract The epididymis is composed of a pseudostratified epithelium that is comprised of various cell types. Studies have shown that rat basal cells share common properties with adult stem cells and begin to differentiate in vitro in response to fibroblast growth factor and 5α-dihydrotestosterone. The characterization of rat basal cells is therefore necessary to fully understand the role of these cells. The objectives of this study were to assess the ability of single basal cells to develop organoids and to assess their ability to self-renew and differentiate in vitro. We isolated basal cells from the rat epididymis and established three-dimensional cell cultures from the basal and nonbasal cell fractions. Organoids were formed by single adult epididymal basal cells. Organoids were dissociated into single basal cells, which were able to reform new organoids, and were maintained over 10 generations. Long-term culture of organoids revealed that these cells could be differentiated into cells expressing the principal cell markers aquaporin 9 and cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator. Electron microscopy demonstrated that organoids were composed of several polarized cell types displaying microvilli and the ability to form tight junctions. Additionally, organoids could be formed by basal cells from either the proximal or distal region of the epididymis and are able to secrete clusterin, a protein implicated in the maturation of spermatozoa. These data indicate that rat basal cells can be used to derive epididymal organoids and further support that notion that these may represent a stem cell population in the epididymis.

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Ein Korpus an Vorlesungstexten aus den Wirtschaftswissenschaften wird daraufhin untersucht, welche sprachlichen Mittel seitens des Textproduzenten eingesetzt werden, um die Rede für die Rezipienten verständlich zu gestalten. Die Untersuchung ist mit dem Ziel entstanden, ausländischen Studierenden, die ein Studium an deutschsprachigen Universitäten und Fachhochschulen aufnehmen wollen, Mittel an die Hand zu geben, Texte, mit denen sie häufig konfrontiert werden, möglichst gut zu verstehen. Um einer Vorlesung bewusst und effektiv folgen zu können, bietet das Wissen um Art, Bedeutung und Wirkungsweise der Kohärenz stiftenden sprachlichen Mittel eine Hilfestellung. Ausgehend von der Prämisse, dass der Fachsprachenunterricht DaF beim Spracherwerb das Fach mit seinen spezifischen Denk- und Mitteilungsstrukturen in den Mittelpunkt stellt (nicht sprachliche Strukturen an sich) (vgl dazu Buhlmann/Fearns 1989:87 und 91f), beschäftigt sich die Arbeit mit den thematischen Mitteln der Textkohärenz: den metakommunikativen Äußerungen, die die Textstruktur sichtbar machen und der Fachlexik. A selection of texts from lectures in economic studies is examined with the purpose to determine which linguistic means are being employed on behalf of the producer of the texts in order to render the speech comprehensible for the recipients. The aim of the investigation is to provide foreign students who want to begin a course at German speaking universities or polytechnics with a tool which helps them to understand as much as possible texts with which they are frequently confronted. In order to be able to consciously and effectively follow a lecture, the knowledge about the type, meaning and way of action of those means which foster coherence by way of linguistic methods, offers valuable help. Taking as a point of departure the fact that during language acquisition the specialized language teaching "German as foreign language" focuses on the specific structures of thought and communication and not on linguistic structures as such, the paper is concerned with the thematic means of text coherence: the meta-communicative expressions which visualize the structure of the text, and the terminology relevant to the specialization.

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What could it possibly mean when a journal brazenly announces that its conceptual theme for an issue is the idea of "Renew"? Does it signal the first signs of panic, that M/C no longer has "it", whatever that elusive "it" might be? Could it indicate that M/C is in the first stages of deaththroes? Could it be some Stalinist or perhaps Maoist moment of cultural revolution and cleansing so that the editorial collective emerges more committed than ever to its mission? Or is it just another example of how marketing ploys have invaded all our discourses and made us appeal to idea of change in order to convince you that we are hip (as Dr Evil intoned in Austin Powers) with it and relevant to these crazy mixed-up times. Well, you would all be right. We wanted to renew the mandate of M/C. We still want to move ideas outward in our study of popular culture in all its manifestations and allow the journal to keep straddling the line between the popular and the academic. Although we have on occasion veered to the discourses of academic disciplines, we have tried to maintain a sensibility about how ideas can migrate and not be cloistered behind the professionalisation of cultural knowledge. We have provided a platform for understanding the shifts in contemporary culture as new media become more central to the rearticulation of our cultural experiences. And we have tried to maintain a thematic approach to critical engagement and allowed those concepts and themes to motivate a lateral patterning of thinking for our writers and readers. There is no question that our strategy has been successful. We have a regular and widely international readership. We have an incredibly international list of contributors to M/C which has given the journal an enviable international and national profile in the field of media and cultural studies. But we want more. We want to be more engaging, more widely read and actively making ideas move from the intellectual periphery to the cultural and political hearths. The 'renew' issue underlines this mandate and attempts to reinvigorate the journal with its original style posture and acknowledgement of its now international contributors. Part of this issue is designed as a moment of self-reflection by those first M/C writers, not so much on the journal itself but more generally on the concept of renewal. The other part of the issue is collected from submissions made to this theme from other writers. What we have produced is a powerful double-shot of perceptive ponderings on renewal in and around media and culture. Opening the issue, Adam Dodd's "'Unacceptable Renewals': The Geopolitics of Martian Cartography" uses the Mars face controversy as a looking glass through which to critique the broader science of cartography, the technologies actualising this science, and the politicised discourses of the people who practice Martian cartographies. The article demonstrates that the values of truth ascribed to cartographic objects are realised through practices that are not free-floating, but located and relocated institutionally and politically (amounting to the same thing). The geopolitics of transportation are explored in Felicity Meakins's "Reknowing the Bicycle; Renewing its Space", which considers the early impacts of the bicycle on our land- and cityscapes, before the motor car made its presence felt. With the resurgence of cycling as a means of transportation as well as recreation, Meakins suggests, some of these effects may be renewed. In "Virtual Domesticity: Renewing Cybernetic Living Environments", Nick Caldwell moves from discussing cyberspace in terms of how it manipulates the real to suggesting how the real can "colonise" cyberspace. Caldwell relates the personal computer to metaphors of domestic space, suggesting that we relate to the PC in ways which reflect our own manipulation of living space. He begins by noting the work space/computer space parallels used in the Windows operation system, through filing icons etc., and then moves to the home analogy. The manipulation of the domestic space is explained more specifically in a descriptive comparison between moving house and reinstalling Windows, spring cleaning and defragmenting, and the audio/visual control panels which bear a remarkable resemblance to the average home hi-fi system. In "Dash or Slash?: Renewing the Link between Media and Culture", M/C's outgoing Production Editor Axel Bruns ruminates on some issues that surrounded the naming of the journal nearly three years ago -- looking at the name "M/C" and the implications that pesky "/" has had for information structuring conventions on the World Wide Web and computer systems in general. What does a slash between the terms reveal about our conceptions of media and/or culture, and of the links between them? P. David Marshall's "Renewing Cultural Studies" offers two essays for the price of one. In one of them, he suggests that the project of cultural studies can be described as the study of recombinant culture, which inherently engenders its own renewals of theory, policy and practice. Following on from this, his second essay engages with the study of cultural production as it occurs on the side of the audience. New media technologies are constantly renewing the relationships between 'producer' and 'audience', enabling a far more active audience role, and a stronger focus of cultural studies on this area might also renew cultural studies' own interests. Some of the themes raised in these articles from the original M/C contributors are also taken up in the other submissions that complete this issue. In "One or Many Media?", Steven Maras also uses M/C's title slash to begin a discussion of the tensions between those treacherously similar terms 'medium', 'media', and 'the media'. In an effort to tease out the fine distinctions separating them, he traces the conceptual frameworks attached to each term, uncovering their complex interrelationships. The spirit of Marx's Grundrisse resonates throughout Janin Hadlaw's comparison of the discourses surrounding newer communications technologies with those which accompanied the emergence of the telephone. In "Plus Que Ça Change: The Telephone and the History of the Future", the material and social realities which provide the emergence of new technologies with their historical footing are also mobilised as a legitimate ground from which a notion of ongoing renewal in the field of techno-communications can be advanced. Finally, Steven Mizrach focusses on another ubiquitous form of communications technology in "Natives on the Electronic Frontier". Taking apart an older anthropological position around media and traditional culture -- that media such as television and radio destroy the authenticity and community roots of a society -- the author works through a preliminary reading of how television can be a source for the renewal of the languages and crafts of an Amerindian community. So, at the end of the first three volumes of M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture, this mixed issue with articles from a number of new as well as some of our longest-serving contributors demonstrates that we've achieved a resonance of ideas between our editorial collective and an impressive list of world-wide collaborators -- as well as, hopefully, with our readers. The coming year will see a number of significant changes in M/C, enabling us to face our future with renewed energy and continue on our mission to connect the popular and the academic; we are not going away, although we are constantly renewing ourselves with each issue and we encourage others to join in this continual process of engaged critical analysis of contemporary culture... Team M/C Citation reference for this article MLA style: Team M/C. "Editorial: 'Renew'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/edit.php>. Chicago style: Team M/C, "Editorial: 'Renew'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Team M/C. (2000) Editorial: 'Renew'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

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Renew is an awkward word. Its prefix seems to make its idea of something 'new' impossible. And everyday experience further underlines the contradiction. My first memory of using the word 'renew' was related to the anxiety of library overdue books: renewing those books was a pragmatic way to avoid the impending fines. This is a useful starting point for pondering any cultural moment of renewal. Renew describes the impetus towards change while acknowledging the past's weighted effect on producing any transformation. It articulates a challenged continuity rather than a break or discontinuity with a particular past. Where I would like to take this idea of renewal is into the realm of cultural studies and its continuing intellectual project through two efforts or essays. Essay 1: Recombinant Culture There are no doubt many ways to characterise the value of cultural studies. What I want to emphasise here is how cultural studies worked to transform the basic conceptualisation of culture itself. These are familiar paths but to identify some of the principal intellectual traits for rethinking and fundamentally renewing the definition of culture: the contested terrain of the popular; the hegemonic restructuring of culture through winning and building of consent as a moving and transforming force; and the concentration on the making of the "other" and the "other's" process of piecing together cultural sense Through all these paths the real power of cultural studies has been its ability to migrate into disciplines and work to renew their internal directions through challenge. Although naturalised homes for cultural studies have been found in media and communication programmes, this has been partly possible through their roughly contemporaneous emergence and partly through this sister intellectual project's capacity to deal seriously with popular culture. Where renewal has been more brazenly articulated is in sites such as geography and its turn to culture and space issues, English and its transformation of its object of study, or musicology with its rereading of popular music and its cadence of cultural meaning and, to a lesser extent sociology and history. What cultural studies has been is a migrating source of renewal across the humanities and social sciences. The core of cultural studies, which is much more difficult to define except in a listing of key concepts and strategies of cultural engagement through intellectual work (of which I provided only a partial list above), has not necessarily gone through this same pattern of renewal over the last 20 years. What I would like to propose here is a moment of rethinking what constitutes cultural studies. This goes beyond Richard Johnson's historical reading of what is cultural studies. Using a new metaphor to describe its approach may begin this renewal of the core. Cultural studies can be rearticulated in terms of its capacity at recombining. As I have indicated, cultural studies has worked to juxtapose its redefinitions of the cultural against and over these 19th century disciplines and has produced quite dramatic shifts in approaches within the disciplines and across the disciplines. Recombining then is the intellectual practice of cultural studies. It generally analyses the form of recombinations that emerge on the contemporary scene. Some have labelled this process hybridisation -- the work of Iain Chambers and Lydia Curti identifies the movements through borders and boundaries both physical and psychical. As a practice, cultural studies can debate and discuss the moments of rupture of the continuous (what previous approaches might call the ideological and naturalised veneer of historical continuity), but with the comprehension of how the rupture negotiates with the past and its ideological weight. In other words, cultural studies' practice is one of perpetual renewal through its study of recombinant culture. These moments of recombination can be seen in the structure of identity and cultural politics, where the stable structures of identity serve as much as political tactics as structures. Most visibly, recombinant culture can be the way to understand how new technologies are used and reformed through use by different cultural communities. Popular music provides a model for this continuous flow of recombining for both renewal and a shifted cultural significance. Sounds are sampled; past songs are layered into a significantly different music and use in current dance music. Recombinant culture may also be studied from the perspective of cultural industries and their efforts to incorporate new technologies into different forms in order to reconstitute audiences in ways that in their distinctiveness produce value that is exchangeable as capital. Understanding the constant negotiation of recombinant culture is where cultural studies should relocate its energies and renew its vitality. Essay 2: Refocussing on Cultural Production One of the successes of cultural studies is its well-developed reading of the practices of reception. The active audience approach has led to understanding how audiences use and contextualise cultural forms. Specifically studies in television, popular music and, to a lesser degree, film have benefitted from this rereading of popular culture and audiences. Clearly underdeveloped in cultural studies is an analysis of production. Yet the massive work on the active audience approach is fundamentally a study of cultural production, albeit in the terminology of reception. What is embedded in the active audience reading of cultural forms is the audience's will to produce the text. This reproduction of the text by the audience not only transforms the text, but also points to the very desire (by cultural studies' research itself in the same way that the researcher's reading of a subculture's political and cultural will was refracted through sartorial style and a cultural politics of street appropriation) for the will to produce in the audience. There is a moment in our recombinant culture that certain technologies have intensified the will to produce, if not production itself. The Internet and the World Wide Web have provided cultural studies a clear shift towards a production ethos that has altered the formal boundaries of what constitutes production. The user of the Internet actively plays the role of producer and audience, not just in terms of a heightened pattern of interactivity but in the regularity and routineness with which Websites appear as part of the general system of cultural production. Because all Websites are distributed and disseminated in one system or network the delineations that used to give television networks their nearly exclusive voice and image of authority are not as easily made via the Internet. This moment of production flux and the cultural politics it has generated is already contested as large media corporations work to differentiate content and "quality" so that websites are hierarchised into different registers of cultural value. What I am arguing for here is a renewal of study that now looks at a different starting point in the cycles of production and consumption for cultural studies. Production in this recombinant culture always implies a process of reception and recontextualisation of the past meanings into current objectives and directions. Cultural studies needs to investigate this current blending of production and consumption more vigorously. For instance, how does Napster shift the play of the production outwards into a myriad of possible recombining producer/consumers who make their music available for others? How is the large music publisher Bertelsmann engaging in a process of capitalising in some way on this process of dissemination through their negotiations with Napster? We are seeing enacted in this one case the changing landscape of cultural production and cultural consumption where the product, the property and the service are no longer clearly defined in either industrially or culturally agreed-upon standards. New media culture in general is operating on different criteria of cultural production and cultural consumption: products seem to be continually in process and in that process include their consumers into the process of production. This is clearly evident in the development of computer games as they include their core "audience" in transforming and improving their "product". The digitalisation of cultural forms has permitted the development of "soft-products": that is, products that can be changed and recombined and are therefore not so easily end-products but as entities are continually in process. Because cultural studies has such a well-developed understanding of the process of the transformation of meaning through its study of active reception, it is particularly valuable in interpreting how this recombinant culture is operating in and through new technologies. In a sense, cultural studies can be deployed in making sense of this transformed cultural economy. Through a shift in focus from consumption to production (but fundamentally working with the same insights about cultural meaning, activity and production), the intellectual project of cultural studies can successfully renew itself. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall. "Renewing Cultural Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/studies.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, "Renewing Cultural Studies," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/studies.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall. (2000) Renewing Cultural Studies. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/studies.php> ([your date of access]).

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Formulation of the problem. This article is devoted to the critical topic of modern Urban studies –the river’s role in urban space. There are many projects of the river’s revitalization in the USA, South Korea, and Europe. These projects improve the condition of climate and ecology in cities and renew rivers have become attractive places for citizens and tourists. In Ukraine, such projects are not so popular, but during the last years, in several cities NGOs, which try to attract attention to this topic, have appeared. Nevertheless, the revitalization project must begin from the deep investigation into the history and natural condition of the river. Therefore, this article’s object is the interaction between the Rivers and the Society in the Kharkiv urban space during the second half of 17th – the early 21st century. The topic was divided to five periods. The first was the second half of 17 – the middle of 18, when the city was the fortress on The Wild Field’s border. Next – 1764 – 1860, when Kharkiv was the typical administrative center of The Russian Empire. Then 1860 – 1917, when the city’s impetuous development dramatically accelerated anthropogenic pressure on the urban space. The fourth – 1917 – 1991 when the town was under Soviet Urban policy. The last – the modern period of Ukrainian Independence, when the revitalization projects have become the actual. Review of previous publications and studies. Kharkiv blue space’s condition was the important theme for historians, ecologists, architects and politics during the 19th – 21st centuries. The global subjects of the river in urban space were started to discuss in Europe in 19th century because of the influence to the river by the industry leading to ecological problems. During the last ten years, L. J. Martin attracted the attention to the history and revitalization of the Providence river (USA). S. Castonguay, M. Evenden published the profound research about the river in urban space. Jaime Lerner determined the place of river in his research «Acupuntura Urbana» Ukrainian ecologists continue to study the level of pollution in Udy, Kharkiv and Lopan. Methods. Using the original Urban Studies methods we considered the rivers as a part of the symmetry urban network. It means that the river is an active actor of the urban connection and can influence the other elements of the net. Results. During the five periods of our theme, river were played the next roles in urban space – sewage, zoning, economic, recreational, and aesthetic. The meaning and scale of these functions were changed according to the historical period. Unregulated use of water sources leads to the pollution of rivers, the spread of infection, and the floods. Scientific novelty and practical significance. The revitalization process starts from the profound cross-disciplinary research about the place of rivers in Kharkiv Urban space. In this article we identified the periodization of the problem, the primary function of the rivers, and the changing of their roles during the period. The next step must be the project of revitalizing the rivers as the cultural object based of their history.

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L’articolo si propone un’analisi della retorica narrativa del film Lo scafandro e la farfalla (2007, diretto da Julian Schnabel, scritto da Ronald Harwood). Il contributo inizia sottolineando il rinnovato interesse per la retorica narrativa tanto negli studi sul cinema e la televisione, quanto nelle analisi che, in prospettiva bioetica, considerano la correttezza di come i problemi di inizio e fine vita sono raccontati nei film e nelle serie televisive. Il contributo procede illustrando il proprio approccio, quello della teoria della sceneggiatura. Lo schema classico di costruzione di una trama è messo a fuoco nella sua valenza argomentativa. Gli snodi che lo costituiscono, infatti, possono essere considerati come altrettanti passaggi di un confronto dialettico dove una tesi è approfondita nel confronto con una tesi opposta. Nel caso del film in questione, la tesi è: “la relazione con gli altri, la condivisione, rende la vita degna anche nella sofferenza”, la controtesi è: “una malattia paralizzante impedisce una vita degna”. L’articolo continua approfondendo la nozione di “retorica progressiva”, sottolineandone i tratti essenziali: impostazione costruttiva; riconsiderazione del concetto di limite; dovuto approfondimento della tesi contraria; tono non predicatorio; rispetto del dato. Nelle conclusioni, si argomenta come il film in esame inveri tutti questi aspetti. In particolare, si argomenta che anticipata alla prima parte del film la scelta bioetica dirimente, la storia può poi svilupparsi in una direzione costruttiva e creativa, non polemica.The article is aimed at analyzing the narrative rhetoric of the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007, directed by Julian Schnabel, written by Ronald Harwood). I begin by stressing the renewed interest for narrative rhetoric. This theoretical perspective has gained new strenght both in the field of film studies and in bioethics, where the representation of beginning and of end of life issues in films and television series is examined in order to evaluate its correctness. I continue by explaining the method of the analysis, which uses the tools of screenwriting theory. I highlight, thus, the argumentative nature of the classic narrative structure of a screenplay. The main passages in a plot, in fact, constitue the steps of a dialectal confrontation between a thematic thesis and a couterthematic antithesis. The theme of The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is expressed by the following statement: “The pain due to a total paralyses annihilates the dignity of human life”. The countertheme is expressed by an opposite statement: “The value of relationships makes life worthy even in the condition of an incurable illness”. The last part of the article is focused on the notion of “progressive rhetoric”. I identify the main traits of this category: the construcrive approach; the reframing of the idea of “limit”, which in this perspective is assumed as “opportunity” and not as “obstacle”; the respect for the opposite opinion; the ability of not being “preachy”; truthfulness. I conclude by arguing that the film in exam is a case of progressive rhetoric. In particular, I argue that, by anticipating the bioetically crucial decision of the character in the first part of the movie, the story can then unfold with a constructive and creative approach to the end of life issue.

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Migration has been a fact of Judaeo-Christian life since the days when Abram left Ur of the Chaldeans to find God’s promised land. It has become a far greater reality since the late 20th century, mainly as a result of wars, intranational conflicts, and natural disasters. As a result we have to deal with a larger number of internally or externally displaced persons (migrants) in Africa at the beginning of the 21st century than ever before. At the same time Africa reports on record numbers in terms of church growth. It is therefore clear that migration and Christian mission to migrants are serious items on the agenda of Christian mission in Africa. The article argues that migration is largely a result of a growing phenomenon of dehumanisation in Africa and worldwide: people tend to regard other people no longer as fellow human beings, created in the image of God. For this reason a very important missionary responsibility is topromote humanisation according to the gospel proclaimed by the new human being, Jesus of Nazareth. This calls for human development of migrants as well as indigenous Christians. It is my contention that the Christian community in Africa has not yet grasped this missionary vocation as it should have. Therefore, the article argues that Christian mission in Africa faces the task of humanising relationships between indigenous Christians and other migrants, and that this can be done through a well-developed programme of human development in which both migrants and indigenous Christians should participate. Sending, migrasie en menslike ontwikkeling: ’n Nuwe benadering. Migrasie is ’n realiteit van die Judese-Christelike lewe sedert Abram Ur van die Galdeërs verlaat het om God se beloofde land te vind. Dit het egter ’n groter realiteit geword sedert die laat twintigste eeu hoofsaaklik as gevolg van oorloë, intranasionale konflik en natuurrampe. As gevolg hiervan moes daar na ’n groter getal migrante in Afrika omgesien word aan die begin van die een-en-twintigste eeu as ooit tevore. In dieselfde periode het die kerk in Afrika met rekordgetalle gegroei. Dit behoort duidelik te wees dat migrasie en Christensending aan migrante hoog op die agenda van Christensending in Afrika behoort te wees. Hierdie artikel spruit voort uit die veronderstelling dat migrasie hoofsaaklik die gevolg van die groeiende verskynsel van verontmensliking (dehumanisering) in Afrika en wêreldwyd is, naamlik om ander mense nie as die beeld van God te erken nie. Om hierdie rede is dit die verantwoordelikheid van sending om menslike ontwikkeling aan die hand van die evangelie, soos dit deur die nuwe mens, Jesus van Nasaret verkondig is, te bevorder. Dit is ’n roeping wat geldend is ten opsigte van migrante sowel as plaaslike Christene. Hierdie artikel veronderstel dat die Christelike gemeenskap nog nie hierdie sendingroeping na behore verstaan nie en sien die taak van sending in Afrika daarom as die vermensliking (humanisering) van die verhouding tussen plaaslike Christene en ander migrante. Hierdie doel kan verwesenlik word deur ’n behoorlik ontwikkelde program van menslike ontwikkeling waarin sowel migrante as Christene moet deel hê.

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In March 2020, co-authors burrough and Starnaman with Technical Director Dale MacDonald had just finished collaborating on a work of computational art, A Kitchen of One’s Own, for The Photographers’ Gallery in London. In this essay we discuss the genealogy of our Zoom performance, Epic Handwashing for Synchronous Participation, which was an extension of two earlier projects—one that was derailed due to COVID-19, and the other that resulted from our pivot towards reflecting on the pandemic experience. Our performance was a response to, and offered a collaborative moment of reflection on, the uncertain moment in time of living in a global pandemic and understanding our experience through participatory art. A Kitchen of One’s Own was commissioned for “Data/Set/Match”—a year-long program dedicated to analysing, interpreting, and visualising image datasets (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald). The image dataset we interpreted is Epic Kitchens’ 2018 collection. Epic Kitchens is a dataset of videos collected by a group of researchers whose participants create non-scripted recordings of daily activities in kitchens. It is the largest known dataset produced using first-person vision. Researchers assign each recorded action with a verb like “wash”, “peel”, “toast”, or “rub” to describe and categorise the event. Our project juxtaposed the videos from Epic Kitchens with quotes from a dataset created by Starnaman with research assistant Alyssa Yates. This work was scheduled for installation on the approximately nine by nine-foot media wall, viewable to the public inside the gallery and to passersby on the street in London’s SoHo neighborhood. However, the work was not sent until May because of the COVID-19 lockdowns in London and Dallas. Thus, feeling trapped and frustrated in our respective homes, totally separated by quarantine, but close in distance, we responded to our historical moment with art. Figure 1: xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman with technical direction by Dale MacDonald, A Kitchen of One’s Own, single frame on the media wall seen from Ramilles Street. The Photographers’ Gallery, London, October 2020. A Kitchen of One’s Own explored personal and domestic kitchen spaces as mundane, politically-charged, and inspirational (fig. 1). The familiar, comforting space of the home kitchen became charged with domestic tropes of the pandemic: hand washing, sanitising, and cooking. We explained, A Kitchen of One’s Own is a speculative remix that confronts Epic Kitchens, a dataset of first-person cooking videos, with quotes from articles and social media posts on sexual harassment in professional and domestic kitchens, podcasts about the kitchen as a political space, and reflective texts by women authors about food and cooking. (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald, “Kitchen”) Taking inspiration from our Kitchen project, we pivoted for audiences online with a browser-based project, Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives. This project (fig. 2) showcases 68 videos found in Epic Kitchens’ 2018 dataset that had been tagged by researchers with the keywords “wash” or “hand”, which burrough and MacDonald optimised for the web browser and republished in a showcase on Vimeo (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald, “Epic”). Starnaman and burrough developed a new dataset of complementary quotes for this iteration including selections from literature written during or about pandemics such as the bubonic plague and the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19. Figure 2: Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives. Browser-based project for The Photographers’ Gallery and Unthinking Photography. March 2020 (https://unthinking.photography/projects/epichandwashing/). We developed Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation (fig. 3) as a Zoom performance of our browser-based project for a virtual engagement session at the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) conference in the summer of 2020 (burrough and Starnaman, “Epic”). In this article, we illustrate these projects as a series of interrelated investigations, and centre on the Zoom performance, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation. We then reflect on the way these works engage a range of public audiences and participants. Figure 3: xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation. Virtual engagement session and participatory performance hosted on Zoom for the ELO conference. This still frame shows a final group performance of hand washing at 21:56 (the complete session was 27:32). July 2020. Blurring Boundaries: Audiences, Participants, Maintenance, and Labour Our past projects demonstrate our commitment to participatory creative practices in which the boundary between audience members, performers, and participants is blurred in the generation of the work of art. Our earliest collaboration, The Laboring Self, was an installation of cardboard cut to the shape of virtual workers’ hands. We collected tracings of hands from workers on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk work platform and laser-cut them from recycled Amazon boxes. In the gallery we invited participants to inscribe or embroider the hands with statements about work before adding them to The Laboring Self installation. Audience members shared their stories, sentiments, anxieties, and hopes about the labour they perform in their everyday lives on hands that crowded a wall space during the span of the exhibition (fig. 4). This work was inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles's 1970s feminist performances in maintenance art, which elevated care-taking and everyday “maintenance” activities to the platform of fine art. In Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, Ukeles confronts the boundary between her everyday performance as a mother, woman, and artist. In particular, with regard to maintenance, Ukeles proposes to “simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art” (qtd. in Burnham). So too, we exhibited the hands of hidden workers to bring visibility to the invisible and asked audience members to become participants by putting on view their own reflections on the various forms of labour they embody. Figure 4: xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman, The Laboring Self, installation view approximately 8 by 10 feet. The Dallas Museum of Art Center for Creative Connections. October 2017-January 2018. For our more recent Zoom-based performance, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation, we again focus on the hands of our audience members-turned participatory performers. As Ukeles used her hands to wash the steps of an urban museum, turning often invisible labour visible through performance, we sought to make the private act of hand washing—an act of personal protection and civic duty—a public performance in the digital town square. The individual hand, which has been central to our work in the past, synecdochally represents the worker, or in this case the person-turned-public-health-citizen. In a world of ubiquitous Zoom calls, the focus is almost always on our faces, our bodies cut off around the shoulders or mid-torso. Hands are but a fleeting on-screen guest. Yet, for this performance, our hands were at the centre of the screen, standing in for our physical effort and existential fear. Directions for Participants Before our performance, we shared this set of directions with participants: Prepare to wash your hands on Zoom in real time by setting up a camera to live stream or recruit a person to film you near your sink. Log into the Zoom link provided. Wash your hands on camera for 20 seconds while we read along with your performance. Notes from the Live Event On 18 July 2020, about 24 people participated in our event as solo participants, as couples, and as families on one Zoom call. The invitation to this project included the instruction to be camera-ready for hand washing at any household sink, so our participatory public entered the call from their kitchens and bathrooms. Before our formal introduction, a couple of tech-savvy kids drew on the Zoom screen (fig. 5), initiating a spirit of playfulness that the adults on the call stepped right into. While we had anticipated this event would elicit a sense of communal action, we were not prepared for just how community- and play-starved we all were. Figure 5: Opening Title Slide, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation. ELO Virtual Engagement Session. 18 July 2020. We set the stage for the performance by introducing Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives, our spring 2020 browser-based project, and gave participants a moment to click through it and to read the texts we had culled for our database of “pandemic quotes” (burrough and Starnaman, “Epic Hand Washing Text Dataset”). Then we explained that our facilitator and Zoom host, John Murray, would be calling on the participants one at a time to wash their hands, while we took turns reading quotes from our archive. The first participant quietly washed their hands, and the pairing of our first quote created a serious tone: “so, at the bidding of the queen, they washed their hands, and all took their places…” (Boccaccio 26). However, the rhythm of the call and response, and the joy of witnessing each other in our various households across the globe, lightened the experience. We, along with participants, reveled in the intimate hygienic dance of hand washing at kitchen sinks and bathroom vanities; one after another we shifted our presence to another person’s living quarters and joined them at the sink. This was a truly mixed, global group. Scholars and artists for whom ELO is a disciplinary home rubbed virtual shoulders with our friends and their own friends who would not have attended ELO otherwise. This event replicated the same kind of shared experience across time and space that the archive of pandemic and hand washing texts elicited. These texts bring humanity together through the calamity of plague and disease, allowing for a sense of larger community, and that is exactly what we saw on the screen: human experience mediated by the screen in conversation with writers across time and connected by the word. Moreover, this event took place in July 2020, a time of “early pandemic”, a time when the complete unknown of the epidemic had given way to the acceptance of quarantining, but before the exhaustion and cynicism of The Long Confinement and Zoom fatigue had fully set in. Thus, we saw an enthusiasm to connect and play with the medium in a way that might have been impossible eight months later. Synchronous Participation as a Performance While the complete performance is archived on the ELO website, we have excerpted a clip from the performance for analysis (burrough and Starnaman, “Excerpt”). It is a 2:15 clip from the middle of the performance, during which we took turns reading quotes from our database while participants washed their hands on camera, one at a time. We showcase this selection of the performance to highlight the repetition embedded in the script. Our directions for participants and our moderator, John Murray, became repetitive mantras throughout the performance, while the reading of the quotes gave participants space to wash their hands. We read four quotes for each participant, which we measured to leave approximately thirty seconds of time for hand washing. We wanted participants to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds, following the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) guidelines, and we predicted that there would be moments when we would begin reading but participants would not yet be washing their hands. Since their performances were out of our control, we decided to read for slightly more than twenty seconds for each participant. From 0 to 22 seconds, Sabrina and our moderator, John Murray, enact the transitional directions between participants. At the start of the clip, Sabrina thanks the participants who have just finished washing their hands—our friends’ twin children, Cora and Henry, who fill the screen in Zoom’s Spotlight mode until eight seconds. The twins are at a double-vanity, washing their hands in coordinated outfits, and moving towards separate towels at the left and right sides of the screen at six seconds. At eight seconds Sabrina is spotlighted. She directs our moderator with the same “set-up phrase” that we repeat throughout the performance: “please mute everyone but us and the next selected hand washer, and don’t forget to change the spotlight to them. When you’re ready, announce who will begin washing their hands.” From 12 to 22 seconds participants are visible in Gallery View while John announces that Tina Escaga will wash their hands next (fig. 6). From 0:22 to 1:07 Tina appears in Spotlight mode. The screen is filled with Tina in the bathroom washing their hands with a white bar of soap. The next set of four quotes are read by xtine, as we watch Tina perform hand washing: "Can we not contrive that he somehow wash himself a little, that he stink not so shrewdly?” (Boccaccio 149). “We are now close to a well, which is never without the pulley and a large bucket; ’tis but a step thither, and we will wash him out of hand” (Boccaccio 149). “Among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of the language” (Woolf 33). “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache” (Woolf 34). Figure 6: Tina washes their hands at the sink with a white bar of soap. From 1:01 to 1:29 xtine thanks Tina, repeats the set-up phrase to John, and John announces that Renee Carmichael is the next performer. The spotlight shifts from Tina to xtine to Gallery View to Renee. From 1:29 to 2:00 Renee appears at their kitchen sink and washes their hands in Spotlight mode as Sabrina can be heard reading the following four quotes: “We’ve not seen anything of the sort before...” (Camus 6). “The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits” (Camus 1). “It becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature” (Woolf 32). “They determined to attach him to the rope, and lower him into the well, there to wash himself...” (Boccaccio 149). From 2:00 to 2:15 Sabrina thanks Renee, repeats the set-up phrase, and John announces “OK, next up, Leo”. From 2:00 to 2:07 we see Sabrina in Spotlight mode, at 2:07 to 2:15 participants are visible in Gallery View, and though this clip ends at 2:15, in the full-length documentation of the performance, Leo is next seen in the Spotlight. In this short clip, it is evident that the repetition of the performance directions sets the stage for our audience / guests / performers, who voluntarily came to this ELO virtual engagement without prior rehearsal. Cora and Henry, Tina, and Renee are prepared with the camera near their sinks and wash their hands for the complete duration of our reading. Tina and Renee (and all of our adult participants) are seen in the video wearing headphones or earbuds for their performance. Our directions did not advise this, but we were encouraged to see that the participants thought ahead about their technical engagement. We also did not advise participants to turn off the water while they were scrubbing their hands. If we were to restage the event, we would include this for water sustainability purposes. It should not be so surprising to us, but we are still amazed at how thoroughly all of our participants washed their hands. Clearly, our performers had watched the directions provided by the CDC for washing viral matter from our bodies. Conclusion Our original project A Kitchen of One’s Own had viewers peering into the recorded kitchen scenes of anonymous participants in person at The Photographers’ Gallery or through the gallery window on Ramillies Street in SoHo, London. Viewers watched the private actions of strangers in their kitchens while being presented with various texts. Some offered descriptions of sexual harassment in often famous professional kitchens and others, the meditations of women about the significance of creation in their home kitchen. This developed an exploration of the significance of women’s experience in place. While fewer people were able to visit the gallery installation, A Kitchen of One’s Own, in London due to the pandemic, many people viewed Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narrative online. Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation put the audience in the domestic space while sharing the historic, traumatic experience of a pandemic, dislocated across time. It invited an entirely online audience to experience a live performance of hand washing at the sinks of strangers and friends, fully mediated through screens on both sides. Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation did exactly what we named it to do—engage people in a live, synchronous elevation of a mundane human action in a personal, yet ubiquitous space to a work of art, while experiencing the asynchronous voices of people who had already lived through global pandemics. This iteration offered us the embodied experience we had originally envisioned for A Kitchen of One’s Own. As a result of the pandemic, people in technologically connected communities are intimately familiar with the online interactive public that was once the realm of digitally savvy producers and users. This reality thus broadens the audience for our online projects. Our previous browser-based art and archive project An Archive of Unnamed Women was largely visited at workshops and conference presentations that we hosted. In previous projects like The Laboring Self, which was installed at the DMA and in the lobby of the California State University, San Marcos library, we transformed library patrons into a participatory-art public. In a moment of transformation, Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation reinvented the pedestrian action of hand washing, like turning an ordinary visit to the library into an encounter with art. Similarly, it reinvented the ubiquitous act of hand washing into a live-for-Zoom performance. We are intrigued by transformation, and this shows in the way we accompany a project though many different forms before moving on to something completely different; our work is iterative by nature. A Kitchen of One’s Own germinated from our project An Archive of Unnamed Women, which pairs images of unnamed women from the New York Public Library with textual selections from fiction by women about women (“Archive of Unnamed Women”). That project engaged the archive and sought to reclaim these women from the obscurity of history. A Kitchen of One's Own took us into the kitchen, exploring what it means for women to labour and create in kitchens, both in ease and amid the duress of sexism and sexual harassment, through videos paired with text. With the pandemic arising in the U.S. and Europe in Spring 2020, we were swept up into the shared confusion, and like so many, we sought to make sense of a moment so catastrophic. We turned to writers of the past who had endured plagues and epidemics to help us gain clarity, creating a video and text synthesis that again allows for speculative meaning-making through fortuitous pairings. Presently, we are evolving this project from pandemic to enlightenment, with an iteration that takes up as inspiration the Instructions for the Zen Cook by thirteenth century Zen Master Eihei Dōgen Zenji. Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation is an iterative work arising from the tensions of a time in transformative upheaval. It was one way we sought to make sense and bring people together in a playful experience that was beyond easy understanding. References Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Filippo and Bernardo Giunti: 1370-71. Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf Edition. <http://flc.ahnu.edu.cn/__local/7/E7/75/6AB8DEBA692DD0CF6790CA70701_26DE4EC2_17EED4.pdf?e=.pdf>. Burnham, Jack. “Problems of Criticism IX: Art and Technology.” ArtForum (Jan. 1971). <http://www.artforum.com/print/197101/problems-of-criticism-ix-art-and-technology-38921>. burrough, xtine, and Sabrina Starnaman. “Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation.” Electronic Literature Organization Virtual Engagement Session. July 2020. <http://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2020/live/events/12>. ———. “Excerpt of ELO Virtual Engagement, ‘Epic Hand Washing for Synchronous Participation’ (2:15).” Vimeo, 19 May 2021. <http://vimeo.com/xtineburrough/elo-zoom>. ———. The Laboring Self. Dallas Museum of Art Center for Creative Connections. Oct. 2017 to Jan. 2018. <http://dma.org/visit-center-creative-connections-community-projects/laboring-self>. ———. Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives: Text Dataset. Mar. 2020. <http://drive.google.com/file/d/1hSV-9l_ETTOruBpI-NCOChjuPtprlZue/view>. ———. An Archive of Unnamed Women. Browser-based project. Oct. 2019. <http://visiblewomen.net/unnamed-women/index.html>. burrough, xtine, and Sabrina Starnaman, with Technical Direction from Dale MacDonald. “A Kitchen of One’s Own.” The Photographers’ Gallery, 1-28 Oct. 2020. <http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/akitchenofonesown>. ———. “Epic Hand Washing.” Vimeo. <https://vimeo.com/showcase/4611141>. Camus, Albert. The Plague. Gallimard, 1947. <http://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/the-plague.pdf>. Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” The Criterion, 1926. <http://thenewcriterion1926.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf>.

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Everyone thinks I named my cat Mango because of his orange eyes but that’s not the case. I named him Mango because the sounds of his purrs and his wheezes and his meows are all various shades of yellow-orange. (Mass 3) Synaesthesia, a condition where stimulus in one sense is perceived in that sense as well as in another, is thought to be a neurological fluke, marked by cross-sensory reactions. Mia, a character in the children’s book A Mango-Shaped Space, has audition colorée or coloured hearing, the most common form of synaesthesia where sounds create dynamic coloured photisms in the visual field. Others with the condition may taste shapes (Cytowic 5), feel colours (Duffy 52), taste sounds (Cytowic 118) or experience a myriad of other sensory combinations. Most non-synaesthetes have never heard of synaesthesia and many treat the condition with disbelief upon learning of it, while synaesthetes are often surprised to hear that others don’t have it. Although there has been a resurgence of interest in synaesthesia recently in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy (Ward and Mattingley 129), there is no widely accepted explanation for how or why synaesthetic perception occurs. However, if we investigate what meaning this particular condition may offer for rethinking not only what constitutes sensory normalcy, but also the ocular-centric bias in cultural studies, especially media studies, synaesthesia may present us with very productive coalitions indeed.Some theorists posit the ultimate role of media of all forms “to transfer sense experiences from one person to another” (Bolter and Grusin 3). Alongside this claim, many “have also maintained that the ultimate function of literature and the arts is to manifest this fusion of the senses” found in synaesthesia (Dann ix). If the most primary of media aims are to fuse and transfer sensory experiences, manifesting these goals would be akin to transferring synaesthetic experience to non-synaesthetes. In some cases, this synaesthetic transfer has been the explicit goal of media forms, from the invention of kaleidoscopes as colour symphonies in 1818 (Dann 66) to the 2002 launch of the video game Rez, the packaging for which reads “Discover a new world. A world of sound, visuals and vibrations. Release your instincts, open your senses and experience synaesthesia” (Rez). Recent innovations such as touch screen devices, advances in 3D film and television technologies and a range of motion-sensing video gaming consoles extend media experience far beyond the audio-visual and as such, present both serious challenges and important opportunities for media and culture scholars to reinvigorate ways of thinking about media experience, sensory embodiment and what might be learned from engaging with synaesthesia. Fleshing out the Field While acknowledging synaesthesia as a specific condition that enhances and complicates the lives of many individuals, I also suggest that synaesthesia is a useful mode of interference into our current ocular-centric notions of culture. Vision and visual phenomena hold a particularly powerful role in producing and negotiating meanings, values and relationships in the contemporary cultural arena and as a result, the eye has become privileged as the “master sense of the modern era” (Jay Scopic 3). Proponents of visual culture claim that the majority of modern life takes place through sight and that “human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before ... in this swirl of imagery, seeing is much more than believing. It is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life” (Mirzoeff 1). In order to enjoy this privilege as the master sense, vision has been disentangled from the muscles and nerves of the eyeball and relocated to the “mind’s eye”, a metaphor that equates a kind of disembodied vision with knowledge. Vision becomes the most non-sensual of the senses, and made to appear “as a negative reference point for the other senses...on the side of detachment, separation” (Connor) or even “as the absence of sensuality” (Haraway). This creates a paradoxical “visual culture” in which the embodied eye is, along with the ear, skin, tongue and nose, strangely absent. If visual culture has been based on the separation of the senses, and in fact, a refutation of embodied senses altogether, what about that which we might encounter and know in the world that is not encompassed by the mind’s eye? By silencing the larger sensory context, what are we missing? What ocular-centric assumptions have we been making? What responsibilities have we ignored?This critique does not wish to do away with the eye, but instead to re-embrace and extend the field of vision to include an understanding of the eye and what it sees within the context of its embodied abilities and limitations. Although the mechanics of the eye make it an important and powerful sensory organ, able to perceive at a distance and provide a wealth of information about our surroundings, it is also prone to failures. Equipped as it is with eyelids and blind spots, reliant upon light and gullible to optical illusions (Jay, Downcast 4), the eye has its weaknesses and these must be addressed along with its abilities. Moreover, by focusing only on what is visual in culture, we are missing plenty of import. The study of visual culture is not unlike studying an electrical storm from afar. The visually impressive jagged flash seems the principal aspect of the storm and quite separate from the rumbling sound that rolls after it. We perceive them and name them as two distinct phenomena; thunder and lightning. However, this separation is a feature only of the distance between where we stand and the storm. Those who have found themselves in the eye of an electrical storm know that the sight of the bolt, the sound of the crash, the static tingling and vibration of the crack and the smell of ozone are mingled. At a remove, the bolt appears separate from the noise only artificially because of the safe distance. The closer we are to the phenomenon, the more completely it envelops us. Although getting up close and personal with an electrical storm may not be as comfortable as viewing it from afar, it does offer the opportunity to better understand the total experience and the thrill of intensities it can engage across the sensory palette. Similarly, the false separation of the visual from the rest of embodied experience may be convenient, but in order to flesh out this field, other embodied senses and sensory coalitions must be reclaimed for theorising practices. The senses as they are traditionally separated are simply put, false categories. Towards SynaestheoryAny inquiry inspired by synaesthesia must hold at its core the idea that the senses cannot be responsibly separated. This notion applies firstly to the separation of senses from one another. Synaesthetic experience and experiment both insist that there is rich cross-fertility between senses in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes alike. The French verb sentir is instructive here, as it can mean “to smell”, “to taste” or “to feel”, depending on the context it is used in. It can also mean simply “to sense” or “to be aware of”. In fact, the origin of the phrase “common sense” meant exactly that, the point at which the senses meet. There also must be recognition that the senses cannot be separated from cognition or, in the Cartesian sense, that body and mind cannot be divided. An extensive and well-respected study of synaesthesia conducted in the 1920s by Raymond Wheeler and Thomas Cutsforth, non-synaesthetic and synaesthetic researchers respectively, revealed that the condition was not only a quirk of perception, but of conception. Synaesthetic activity, the team deduced “is an essential mechanism in the construction of meaning that functions in the same way as certain unattended processes in non-synaesthetes” (Dann 82). With their synaesthetic imagery impaired, synaesthetes are unable to do even a basic level of thinking or recalling (Dann, Cytowic). In fact, synaesthesia may be a universal process, but in synaesthetes, “a brain process that is normally unconscious becomes bared to consciousness so that synaesthetes know they are synaesthetic while the rest of us do not” (166). Maurice Merleau-Ponty agrees, claiming:Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we unlearn how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel in order to deduce, from our bodily organisation and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and feel. (229) With this in mind, neither the mind’s role nor the body’s role in synaesthesia can be isolated, since the condition itself maintains unequivocally that the two are one.The rich and rewarding correlations between senses in synaesthesia prompt us to consider sensory coalitions in other experiences and contexts as well. We are urged to consider flows of sensation seriously as experiences in and of themselves, with or without interpretation and explanation. As well, the debates around synaesthetic experience remind us that in order to speak to phenomena perceived and conceived it is necessary to recognise the specificities, ironies and responsibilities of any embodied experience. Ultimately, synaesthesia helps to highlight the importance of relationships and the complexity of concepts necessary in order to practice a more embodied and articulate theorising. We might call this more inclusive approach “synaestheory”.Synaestheorising MediaDystopia, a series of photographs by artists Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher suggests a contemporary take on Decartes’s declaration that “I will now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will turn away my senses from their objects” (86). These photographs consist of digitally altered faces where the subject’s skin has been stretched over the openings of eyes, nose, mouth and ears, creating an interesting image both in process and in product. The product of a media mix that incorporates photography and computer modification, this image suggests the effects of the separation from our senses that these media may imply. The popular notion that media allow us to surpass our bodies and meet without our “meat” tagging along is a trope that Aziz and Cucher expose here with their computer-generated cover-up. By sealing off the senses, they show us how little we now seem to value them in a seemingly virtual, post-embodied world. If “hybrid media require hybrid analyses” (Lunenfeld in Graham 158), in our multimedia, mixed media, “mongrel media” (Dovey 114) environment, we need mongrel theory, synaestheory, to begin to discuss the complexities at hand. The goal here is producing an understanding of both media and sensory intelligences as hybrid. Symptomatic of our simple sense of media is our tendency to refer to media experiences as “audio-visual”: stimuli for the ear, eye or both. However, even if media are engineered to be predominately audio and/or visual, we are not. Synaestheory examines embodied media use, including the sensory information that the media does not claim to concentrate on, but that is still engaged and present in every mediated experience. It also examines embodied media use by paying attention to the pops and clicks of the material human-media interface. It does not assume simple sensory engagement or smooth engagement with media. These bumps, blisters, misfirings and errors are just as crucial a part of embodied media practice as smooth and successful interactions. Most significantly, synaesthesia insists simply that sensation matters. Sensory experiences are material, rich, emotional, memorable and important to the one sensing them, synaesthete or not. This declaration contradicts a legacy of distrust of the sensory in academic discourse that privileges the more intellectual and abstract, usually in the form of the detached text. However, academic texts are sensory too, of course. Sound, feeling, movement and sight are all inseparable from reading and writing, speaking and listening. We might do well to remember these as root sensory situations and by extension, recognise the importance of other sensual forms.Indeed, we have witnessed a rise of media genres that appeal to our senses first with brilliant and detailed visual and audio information, and story or narrative second, if at all. These media are “direct and one-dimensional, about little, other than their ability to commandeer the sight and the senses” (Darley 76). Whereas any attention to the construction of the media product is a disastrous distraction in narrative-centred forms, spectacular media reveals and revels in artifice and encourages the spectator to enjoy the simulation as part of the work’s allure. It is “a pleasure of control, but also of being controlled” (MacTavish 46). Like viewing abstract art, the impact of the piece will be missed if we are obsessed with what the artwork “is about”. Instead, we can reflect on spectacular media’s ability, like that of an abstract artwork, to impact our senses and as such, “renew the present” (Cubitt 32).In this framework, participation in any medium can be enjoyed not only as an interpretative opportunity, but also as an experience of sensory dexterity and relevance with its own pleasures and intelligences; a “being-present”. By focusing our attention on sensory flows, we may be able to perceive aspects of the world or ourselves that we had previously missed. Every one of us–synaesthete or nonsynaesthete–has a unique blueprint of reality, a unique way of coding knowledge that is different from any other on earth [...] By quieting down the habitually louder parts of our mind and turning the dial of our attention to its darker, quieter places, we may hear our personal code’s unique and usually unheard “song”, needing the touch of our attention to turn up its volume. (Duffy 123)This type of presence to oneself has been termed a kind of “perfect immediacy” and is believed to be cultivated through meditation or other sensory-focused experiences such as sex (Bolter and Grusin 260), art (Cubitt 32), drugs (Dann 184) or even physical pain (Gromala 233). Immersive media could also be added to this list, if as Bolter and Grusin suggest, we now “define immediacy as being in the presence of media” (236). In this case, immediacy has become effectively “media-cy.”A related point is the recognition of sensation’s transitory nature. Synaesthetic experiences and sensory experiences are vivid and dynamic. They do not persist. Instead, they flow through us and disappear, despite any attempts to capture them. You cannot stop or relive pure sound, for example (Gross). If you stop it, you silence it. If you relive it, you are experiencing another rendition, different even if almost imperceptibly from the last time you heard it. Media themselves are increasingly transitory and shifting phenomena. As media forms emerge and fall into obsolescence, spawning hybrid forms and spinoffs, the stories and memories safely fixed into any given media become outmoded and ultimately inaccessible very quickly. This trend towards flow over fixation is also informed by an embodied understanding of our own existence. Our sensations flow through us as we flow through the world. Synaesthesia reminds us that all sensation and indeed all sensory beings are dynamic. Despite our rampant lust for statis (Haraway), it is important to theorise with the recognition that bodies, media and sensations all flow through time and space, emerging and disintegrating. Finally, synaesthesia also encourages an always-embodied understanding of ourselves and our interactions with our environment. In media experiences that traditionally rely on vision the body is generally not only denied, but repressed (Balsamo 126). Claims to disembodiment flood the rhetoric around new media as an emancipatory element of mediated experience and somehow, seeing is superimposed on embodied being to negate it. However phenomena such as migraines, sensory release hallucinations, photo-memory, after-images, optical illusions and most importantly here, the “crosstalk” of synaesthesia (Cohen Kadosh et al. 489) all attest to the co-involvement of the body and brain in visual experience. Perhaps useful here for understanding media involvement in light of synaestheory is a philosophy of “mingled bodies” (Connor), where the world and its embodied agents intermingle. There are no discrete divisions, but plenty of translation and transfer. As Sean Cubitt puts it, “the world, after all, touches us at the same moment that we touch it” (37). We need to employ non-particulate metaphors that do away with the dichotomies of mind/body, interior/exterior and real/virtual. A complex embodied entity is not an object or even a series of objects, but embodiment work. “Each sense is in fact a nodal cluster, a clump, confection or bouquet of all the other senses, a mingling of the modalities of mingling [...] the skin encompasses, implies, pockets up all the other sense organs: but in doing so, it stands as a model for the way in which all the senses in their turn also invagin*te all the others” (Connor). The danger here is of delving into a nostalgic discussion of a sort of “sensory unity before the fall” (Dann 94). The theory that we are all synaesthetes in some ways can lead to wistfulness for a perfect fusion of our senses, a kind of synaesthetic sublime that we had at one point, but lost. This loss occurs in childhood in some theories, (Maurer and Mondloch) and in our aboriginal histories in others (Dann 101). This longing for “original syn” is often done within a narrative that equates perfect sensory union with a kind of transcendence from the physical world. Dann explains that “during the modern upsurge in interest that has spanned the decades from McLuhan to McKenna, synaesthesia has continued to fulfil a popular longing for metaphors of transcendence” (180). This is problematic, since elevating the sensory to the sublime does no more service to understanding our engagements with the world than ignoring or degrading the sensory. Synaestheory does not tolerate a simplification of synaesthesia or any condition as a ticket to transcendence beyond the body and world that it is necessarily grounded in and responsible to. At the same time, it operates with a scheme of senses that are not a collection of separate parts, but blended; a field of intensities, a corporeal coalition of senses. It likewise refuses to participate in the false separation of body and mind, perception and cognition. More useful and interesting is to begin with metaphors that assume complexity without breaking phenomena into discrete pieces. This is the essence of a new anti-separatist synaestheory, a way of thinking through embodied humans in relationships with media and culture that promises to yield more creative, relevant and ethical theorising than the false isolation of one sense or the irresponsible disregard of the sensorium altogether.ReferencesAziz, Anthony, and Sammy Cucher. Dystopia. 1994. 15 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.azizcucher.net/1994.php>. Balsamo, Anne. “The Virtual Body in Cyberspace.” Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 116-32.Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.Cohen Kadosh, Roi, Avishai Henik, and Vincent Walsh. “Synaesthesia: Learned or Lost?” Developmental Science 12.3 (2009): 484-491.Connor, Steven. “Michel Serres’ Five Senses.” Michel Serres Conference. Birkbeck College, London. May 1999. 5 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/skc/5senses.htm>. Cubitt, Sean. “It’s Life, Jim, But Not as We Know It: Rolling Backwards into the Future.” Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context. Ed. Jon Dovey. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996. 31-58.Cytowic, Richard E. The Man Who Tasted Shapes: A Bizarre Medical Mystery Offers Revolutionary Insights into Emotions, Reasoning and Consciousness. New York: Putnam Books, 1993.Dann, Kevin T. Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000.Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Trans. Johnn Veitch. New York: Prometheus Books, 1989.Dovey, Jon. “The Revelation of Unguessed Worlds.” Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context. Ed. Jon Dovey. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996. 109-35. Duffy, Patricia Lynne. Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds. New York: Times Books, 2001.Graham, Beryl. “Playing with Yourself: Pleasure and Interactive Art.” Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context. Ed. Jon Dovey. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996. 154-81.Gromala, Diana. "Pain and Subjectivity in Virtual Reality." Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture. Ed. Lynn Hershman Leeson. Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. 222-37.Haraway, Donna. “At the Interface of Nature and Culture.” Seminar. European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland, 17-19 Jun. 2003.Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California P, 1993.Jay, Martin. "Scopic Regimes of Modernity." Hal Foster, Ed. Vision and Visuality. New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1988. 2-23.MacTavish. Andrew. “Technological Pleasure: The Performance and Narrative of Technology in Half-Life and other High-Tech Computer Games.” ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. Eds. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska. London: Wallflower P, 2002. Mass, Wendy. A Mango-Shaped Space. Little, Brown and Co., 2003.Maurer, Daphne, and Catherine J. Mondloch. “Neonatal Synaesthesia: A Re-Evaluation.” Eds. Lynn C. Robertson and Noam Sagiv. Synaesthesia: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1989.Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “What Is Visual Culture?” The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge, 1998. 3-13.Rez. United Game Artists. Playstation 2. 2002.Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.Ward, Jamie, and Jason B. Mattingley. “Synaesthesia: An Overview of Contemporary Findings and Controversies.” Cortex 42.2 (2006): 129-136.

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Abstract:

The theme for this issue of M/C is 'renew'. This is a term that could be approached in numerous ways: as a cultural practice, in terms of broader dynamics of change, in terms of the future of the journal. In this piece, however, I'd like to narrow the focus and think about renewal in the context of the concept of 'media' and media theory. This is not to diminish the importance of looking at media in relation to changing technologies, and changing cultural contexts. Indeed, most readers of M/C will no doubt be aware of the dangers of positing media outside of culture in some kind of deterministic relationship. Indeed, the slash in the title of M/C -- which since its first editorial both links and separates the terms 'media' and 'culture' -- is interesting to think about here precisely because the substitution of the 'and' opens up a questioning of the relation between the two terms. While I too want to keep the space between media / culture filled with possibility, in this piece I want to look mainly at one side of the slash and speculate on renewal in the way we relate to ideas of media. Since its first editorial the slash has also been a marker of M/C's project to bridge academic and popular approaches, and work as a cross-over journal. In the hope of not stretching the cross-over too far, I'd like to bring contemporary philosophy into the picture and keep it in the background while thinking about renewal and the concept of 'media'. A key theme in contemporary philosophy has been the attempt to think difference beyond any opposition of the One and the Many (Patton 29-48; Deleuze 38-47). In an effort to think difference in its own terms, philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida have resisted seeing difference as something dependant on, derivative or secondary to a primary point of sameness and identity. In this brief piece, and out of respect of M/C's project, my intention is not to summarise this work in detail. Rather, I want to highlight the existence of this work in order to draw a contrast with the way in which contemporary thinking about media often seems caught up in a dynamic of the One and Many, and to pose the question of a different path for media theory. Having mentioned philosophy, I do want to make the point that 'One or Many Media' is not just an abstract formulation. On the contrary, the present day is a particularly appropriate time to look at this problem. Popular discussion of media issues itself oscillates between an idea of Media dominance (the One) and an idea of multiple media (multimedia). Discussions of convergence frequently invoke a thematics of the One arising out of the Many, or of the Many arising from the One. Medium, Media, the Media. Which one to use? We need only to list these three terms to begin see how the tension between the One and the Multiple has influenced contemporary thinking about media. An obvious tension exists on the level of grammar. 'Media' is the plural of 'Medium'. That is, until we use the term 'the Media' which can be used to refer to the singularity of (a specific area of) the Press. Walter Ong dubs 'medium' "the fugitive singular" to describe this phenomenon (175). To compensate for the increasing use of 'the media' as a singular it is becoming more common to see the term 'mediums' instead of 'media'. A second tension exists on the level of the senses. 'The media', and in some senses a 'medium', conveys the notion of a media form distinct from the senses. As Michael Heim notes, Medium meant conceptual awareness in conjunction with the five senses through which we come to understand things present before us in the environment. This natural sense of media was gradually dissipated during the modern period by man-made extensions and enhancements of the human senses ... . Electronic media gave new meaning to the term. We not only perceive directly with five senses aided by concepts and enhanced by instrumentation, but also are surrounded by a panorama of man-made images and symbols far more complex than can be assimilated directly through the senses and thought processes. Media in the electronic sense of acoustic-optic technology ... appear to do more than augment innate human sensory capacities: the electronic media become themselves complex problems; they become facts of life we must take into account as we live; they become, in short, the media. (47) In this passage, Heim shows how through extension and instrumentation 'the media' comes to occupy a different register of existence. 'The media' in this account are distinct from any general artefact that can serve as a means of communication to us. On this register, 'the media' also develops into the idea of the mass media (see Williams 169). In popular usage this incorporates print and broadcasting areas (usually with a strong journalistic emphasis), and is often personified around a notion of 'the media' as an agent in the contemporary political arena (the fourth estate, the instrument of a media baron). This brings us to a third tension, to do with diversity. The difference between the terms 'Medium', 'Media', 'the Media', is clearly bound up with the issue of diversity and concentration of media. Sean Cubitt argues that a different activation of interactive media, intermedia, or video media, is crucial to restoring an electronic ecology that has been destroyed by the marketplace (207). What the work of theorists like Cubitt reveals is that the problem of diversity and concentration has a conceptual dimension. Framed within an opposition between the One and the Multiple, the diversity in question -- of different senses and orders of media -- is constrained by the dominant idea of the Media. Many theorists and commentators on 'the Mass media' barely acknowledge the existence of video media unless it is seen as a marketplace for the distribution of movies. This process of marginalisation has been so thorough that the contemporary discussion of the Internet or interactive digital media often ignores previous critical discussion of the electronic arts -- as if McLuhan had no connection with Fluxus, or convergence had no links to intermedia experimentation. In a different example, it is becoming common to discuss 'personal media' like laptops and intelligent jewellery (see Beniger; Kay and Goldberg). But if media theory has previously failed to look at T-shirts and other personal effects as media then this is in part due to the dominance of the idea of the mass media in conceptual terms. This dominance leads Umberto Eco to propose an idea of the "multiplication of the media" against the idea of mass media, and prompts him to declare that "all the professors of theory of communications, trained by the texts of twenty years ago (this includes me) should be pensioned off" (149). It could be argued that rather than represent a problem the sliding between these terms is enabling not disabling. From this perspective, the fact that different senses of media collapse or coalesce with one another is appropriate, since (as I hope I've shown) different senses of media are often grounded in other senses. Indeed, we can agree with this argument, and go further to suggest that renewing our relationship to concepts of media involves affirming the interplay of different senses of media. What needs careful consideration here, however, is how we think of different senses of media. For it is very often the case that this question of difference is blocked from discussion when an order of media is used to secure a territory or a foundation for a particular idea of how things should work. From this foundation particular ideas of One-ness/Same-ness or Many-ness can emerge, each of which involves making assumptions about differences between media, and the nature of difference. Examples might include notions of mainstream and alternative, professional and non-professional, 'industry' and 'artistic' ways of working.1 In each case a dominant idea of the media establishes itself as an order against which other practices are defined as secondary, and other senses of media subordinate. Surveying these tensions (grammatical, sensory and diversity) between the terms 'Medium', 'Media', 'the Media', what becomes apparent is that neither of them is able to stand as 'the' primary conceptual term. Attempting to read contemporary developments in light of the One of the mass media means that theory is often left to discuss the fate of an idea, broadcasting, that represents only one way of organising and articulating a medium. Certainly, this approach can yield important results on the level of audience studies and identity politics, and in respect to government policy. Jock Given's work on broadcasting as a "set of technologies, social and cultural practices, cultural forms, industries, institutional forms, words and an idea" usefully contests the idea that broadcasting is dying or has no place in the digital future (46). However, research of this kind is often constrained by its lack of engagement with different orders of media, and its dependence on an idea of the One medium that is now under erasure.2 Attempting to read contemporary developments in light of the One of the mass media means that theory is often left to discuss the fate of an idea, broadcasting, that represents only one way of organising and articulating a medium. Certainly, this approach can yield important results on the level of audience studies and identity politics, and in respect to government policy. Jock Given's work on broadcasting as a "set of technologies, social and cultural practices, cultural forms, industries, institutional forms, words and an idea" usefully contests the idea that broadcasting is dying or has no place in the digital future (46). However, research of this kind is often constrained by its lack of engagement with different orders of media, and its dependence on an idea of the One medium that is now under erasure.2 Exploring the potential of 'Medium' as a primary term leads again into the problem of the One and the Many. The content of every medium may be, as McLuhan said, another medium (8). But we should search for the hidden One that binds together the Many. Indeed, multimedia can precisely be seen in this way: as a term that facilitates the singularising of multiple media. In a historically significant 1977 paper "Personal Dynamic Media" by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, we read that the essence of a medium is very much dependent on the way messages are embedded, changed, and viewed. Although digital computers were originally designed to do arithmetic computation, the ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided. (255) It is following this passage that Kay and Goldberg use the term "metamedium" to describe this system, which effectively seals the Many into the One, and compromises any sense that 'multimedia' can fully live up to the idea of multiple media. Situating the term 'media' as a primary term is interesting primarily because Heim deems it the "natural sense of media". There is some value in re-asserting the most general understanding of this idea, which is that any artefact can serve to communicate something to the senses. That said, any exploration of this kind needs to keep a critical eye not just on the McLuhanesque extension of the senses that Heim mentions, but also the imperative that these artefacts must mediate, and function as a means of communication. In other words, any celebration of this conception of media needs to be careful not to naturalise the idea that communication is the transmission of ideal contents. As Derrida's work shows, a complex system is required for a media to work in this way. It is only via a particular system of representation that a medium comes to serve as a vehicle for communication (311-2). As such, we should be wary of designating this idea of media as 'natural'. There are of course other reasons to be cautious with the use of the term 'natural' in this context. Contemporary usage of 'media' show that the human sensorium has already entered a complex cyborg future in which human actions, digital files, data, scripts, can be considered 'media' in a performance work or some other assemblage. Contemporary media theory resolves some of the problems of the terms 'Medium', 'Media', 'the Media' serving as a primary conceptual figure by reading them against one another. Thus, the mass media can be criticised from the point of view of the broader potential of the medium, or transformations in a medium can be tracked through developments in interactive media. Various critical or comparative approaches can be adopted within the nexus defined by these three terms. One important path of investigation for media theory is the investigation of hybrid mixed forms of media as they re-emerge out of more or less well defined definitions of a medium. A concern that can be raised with this approach, however, is that it risks avoiding the problem of the One or Many altogether in the way it posits some media as 'pure' or less hybrid in the first instance. In the difficult process of approaching the problem of One or Many media, media theory may find it worthwhile listen in on discussion of the One or Many opposition in contemporary philosophy. Two terms that find a prominent place in Deleuze's discussion of the multiplicity are "differentiation" and "actualisation". I'd want to suggest that both terms should hold interest for media theorists. For example, in terms of the problem of One or Many Media, we can note that differentiation and actualisation have not always been looked at. Too often, the starting point for theories of media is to begin with a particular order of media, a conception of the One, and then situate multiple practices in relationship to this One. Thus, 'the media' or 'mass media' is able to take the position of centre, with the rest left subordinate. This gesture allows the plural form of 'media' to be dealt with in a reductive way, at the expense of an analysis of supposed plurality. (It also works to detach the discussion of the order of media in question from other academic and non-academic disciplines that may have a great deal to say about the way media work.) A different approach could be to look at the way this dominant order is actualised in the first place. Recognition that a multiplicity of different senses of media pre-exists any single order of media would seem to be a key step towards renewal in media theory. This piece has sought to disturb the way a notion of the One or Many media often works in the space of media theory. Rather than locate this issue in relation to only one definition of media or medium, this approach attempts to differentiate between different senses of media, ranging from those understandings linked to the human sensorium, those related to craft understandings, and those related to the computerised manipulation of media resources. The virtue of this approach is that it tackles head on the issue that there is no one understanding of media that can function as an over-arching term in the present. The human senses, craft, broadcasting, and digital manipulation are all limited in this respect. Any response to this situation needs to engage with this complexity by recognising that some understandings of media exceed the space of a medium. These other understandings can form useful provisional points of counter-actualisation.4 Footnotes Recent Australian government decisions about the differences between digital television and datacasting would be interesting to examine here. In relation to Given's work I'd suggest that a fuller examination of media's digital future needs to elaborate on the relationship between 'the media' and alternative understandings of the term in computing, for example, such as Kay and Goldberg's. In this way, the issue of future conceptions of media can be opened up alongside the issue of a future for the media. Monaco's, "Mediography: In the Middle of Things" is a rare example. In the section 'Levels of the Game' Monaco usefully distinguishes between different orders of media. My thanks to the anonymous M/C reviewers for their useful comments, and also Anna Munster for her suggestions. References Beniger, James R. "Personalisation of Mass Media and the Growth of Pseudo-Community." Communication Research 14.3 (June 1987): 352-71. Cubitt, Sean. Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture. London: Macmillan, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1986. Eco, Umberto. "The Multiplication of the Media." Travels in Hyper-Reality. Trans. William Weaver. London: Pan, 1986. 145-50. Given, Jock. The Death of Broadcasting: Media's Digital Future. Kensington: U of New South Wales P, 1998. Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987. Kay, Alan, and Adele Goldberg. "Personal Dynamic Media." A History of Personal Workstations. Ed. Adele Goldberg. New York: ACM/Addison-Wesley, 1988. 254-63. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Monaco, James. "Mediography: In the Middle of Things." Media Culture. Ed. James Monaco. New York: Delta, 1978. 3-21. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Patton, Paul. Deleuze and the Political. London: Routledge, 2000. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1976. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Steven Maras. "One or Many Media?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/many.php>. Chicago style: Steven Maras, "One or Many Media?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/many.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Steven Maras. (2000) One or many media? M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/many.php> ([your date of access]).

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Introduction Children are beginning to use digital technologies at younger and younger ages. The emerging trend of very young children (babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers) using Internet connected devices, especially touch screen tablets and smartphones, has elicited polarising opinions from early childhood experts. At present there is little actual research about the risks or benefits of tablet and smartphone use by very young children. Current usage recommendations, based on research into passive television watching which claims that screen time is detrimental, is in conflict with advice from education experts and app developers who commend interactive screen time as engaging and educational. Guidelines from the health professions typically advise strict time limits on very young children’s screen-time. Based for the most part on policy developed by the American Academy of Paediatrics, it is usually recommended that children under two have no screen time at all (Brown), and children over this age have no more than two hours a day (Strasburger, et al.). On the other hand, early childhood education guidelines promote the development of digital literacy skills (Department of Education). Further, education-based research indicates that access to computers and the Internet in the preschool years is associated with overall educational achievement (Bittman et al.; Cavanaugh et al; Judge et al; Neumann). The US based National Association for Education of Young Children’s position statement on technology for zero to eight year-olds declares that “when used intentionally and appropriately, technology and interactive media are effective tools to support learning and development” (NAEYC). This article discusses the notion of Digitods—a name for those children born since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 who have ready access to touchscreen technologies since birth. It reports on the limited availability of evidence-based research about these children’s ICT use concluding that current research and recommendations are not grounded in the everyday life of very young children and their families. The article then reports on the beginnings of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled Toddlers and Tablets: exploring the risks and benefits 0-5s face online. This research project recognises that at this stage it is parents who “are the real experts in their toddlers’ use of screen technologies. Accordingly, the project’s methodological approach draws on parents, pre-schoolers and their families as communities of practice in the construction of social meaning around toddlers’ use of touch screen technology. Digitods In 2000 Bill Gates introduced the notion of Generation I to describe the first cohort of children raised with the Internet as a reality in their lives. They are those born after the 1990s and will, in most cases; have no memory of life without the Net. [...] Generation I will be able to conceive of the Internet’s possibilities far more profoundly than we can today. This new generation will become agents of change as the limits of the Internet expand to include educational, scientific, and business applications that we cannot even imagine. (Gates)Digitods, on the other hand, is a term that has been used in education literature (Leathers et al.) to describe those children born after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. These children often begin their lives with ready access to the Internet via easily usable touch screen devices, which could have been designed with toddlers’ touch and swipe movements in mind. Not only are they the youngest group of children to actively engage with the Internet they are the first group to grow up with a range of mobile Internet devices (Leathers et al.). The difference between Digitods and Gates’s Generation I is that Digitods are the first pre-verbal, non-ambulant infants to have ready access to digital technologies. Somewhere around the age of 10 months to fourteen months a baby learns to point with his or her forefinger. At this stage the child is ready to swipe and tap a touch screen (Leathers et al.). This is in contrast to laptops and PCs given that very young children often need assistance to use a mouse or keyboard. The mobility of touch screen devices allows very young children to play at the kitchen table, in the bedroom or on a car trip. These mobile devices have, of course, a myriad of mobile apps to go with them. These apps create an immediacy of access for infants and pre-schoolers who do not need to open a web browser to find their favourite sites. In the lives of these children it seems that it has always been possible to touch and swipe their way into games, books and creative and communicative experiences (Holloway et al. 149). The interactivity of most pre-school apps, as opposed to more passive screen activities such as watching television shows or videos (both offline or online), requires toddlers and pre-schoolers to pay careful attention, think about things and act purposefully (Leathers et al.). It is this interactivity which is the main point of difference, one which holds the potential to engage and educate our youngest children. It should be noted within this discussion about Digitods that, while the trope Digital Natives tends to hom*ogenise an entire generation, the authors do not assume that all children born today are Digitods by default. Many children do not have the same privileged opportunities as others, or the (parental) cultural capital, to enable access, ease of use and digital skill development. In addition to this it is not implied that Digitods will be more tech savvy than their older siblings. The term is used more to describe and distinguish those children who have digital access almost since birth—in order to differentiate or tease out everyday family practices around these children’s ICT use and the possible risks and benefits this access affords babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers. While the term Digital Native has also been criticised as being a white middle class phenomenon this is not necessarily the case with Digitods. In the Southeast Asia and the Pacific region developed countries like Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore have extremely high rates of touchscreen use by very young children (Child Sciences; Jie; Goh; Unantenne). Other countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia have moved to a high smart phone usage by very young children while at the same time have only nascent ICT access and instruction within their education systems (Unantenne). The Digitod Parent Parents of Digitods are usually experienced Internet users themselves, and many are comfortable with their children using these child-friendly touch screen devices (Findahl). Digital technologies are integral to their everyday lives, often making daily life easier and improving communication with family and friends, even during the high pressure parenting years of raising toddlers and pre-schoolers. Even though many parents and caregivers are enabling very young children’s use of touch screen technologies, they are also concerned about the changes they are making. This is because very young children’s use of touch screen devices “has become another area where they fear possible criticism and in which their parental practices risk negative evaluation by others” (Holloway et al). The tensions between expert advice regarding young children’s screen-time and parents’ and caregivers’ own judgments are also being played out online. Parenting blogs, online magazines and discussion groups are all joining in the debate: On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition—but only if they are used just so. (Rosin)Thus, with over 80 000 children’s apps marketed as educational in the Apple App Store alone, parents can find it difficult to choose apps that are worth purchasing (Yelland). Nonetheless, recent research regarding Australian children shows that three to five year olds who access touch screen devices will typically have five or more specific apps to choose from (5.23 on average) (Neumann). With little credible evidence or considered debate, parents have been left to make their own choices about the pros and cons of their young children’s access to touch screens. Nonetheless, one immediate benefit that comes to mind is toddlers and pre-schoolers video chatting with dispersed family member—due to increased globalisation, guest worker arrangements, FIFO (fly-in fly-out) workforces and family separation or divorce. Such clear benefits around sociability and youngsters’ connection with significant others make previous screen-related guidelines out of date and no longer contextually relevant. Little Research Attention Family ownership of tablet devices as well as touch screen phones has risen dramatically in the last five years. With very young children being loaned these technologies by mum or dad, and a tendency in Australia to rely on market-orientated research regarding ownership and usage, there is very little knowledge about touch screen usage rates for very young Australian children. UK and US usage figures indicate that over the last few years there has been a five-fold increase in tablet uptake by zero to eight year olds (Ofcom; Rideout). Although large scale, comparative Australian data is not available, previous research regarding older children indicates that Australia is similar to high use countries like some Scandinavian nations and the UK (Green et al.). In addition to this, two small research projects in Australia, with under 160 participant families each, indicate that two thirds of these children (0-5) use touchscreen devices (Neumann; Coenenna et. al.). Beyond usage figures, there is also very limited evidence-based research about very young children’s app use. Interactive technologies available via touch screen technologies have been available domestically for a very short time. Consequently, “valid scientific research has not been completed and replicated due to [the lack of] available time” (Leathers el al. 129) and longitudinal studies which rely on an intervention group (in this case exposure to children’s apps) and a control group (no exposure) are even fewer and more time-consuming. Interestingly, researchers have revisited the issue of passive screen viewing. A recent 2015 review of previous 2007 research, which linked babies watching videos with poor language development, has found that there was statistical and methodological issues with the 2007 study and that there are no strong inferences to be drawn between media exposure and language development (Ferguson and Donellan). Thus, there seems to be no conclusive evidence-based research on which to inform parents and educators about the possible downside or benefits of touch screen use. Nonetheless, early childhood experts have been quick to weigh in on the possible effects of screen usage, some providing restrictive guidelines and recommendations, with others advocating the use of interactive apps for very young children for their educational value. This knowledge-gap disguises what is actually happening in the lives of real Australian families. Due to the lack of local data, as well as worldwide research, it is essential that Australian researchers obtain a comprehensive understanding about actual behaviour around touch screen use in the lives of children aged between zero and five and their families. Beginning Research While research into very young children’s touch screen use is beginning to take place, few results have been published. When researching two to three year olds’ learning from interactive versus non-interactive videos Kirkorian, Choi and Pempek found that “toddlers may learn more from interactive media than from non-interactive video” (Kirkorian et al). This means that the use of interactive apps on touch screen devices may hold a greater potential for learning than passive video or television viewing for children in this age range. Another study considered the degree to which the young children could navigate to and use apps on touch screen devices by observing and analysing YouTube videos of infants and young children using touch screens (Hourcade et al.). It was found that between the ages of 12 months and 17 months the children filmed seemed to begin to “make meaningful use of the tablets [and] more than 90 per cent of children aged two [had] reached this level of ability” (1923). The kind of research mentioned above, usually the preserve of psychologists, paediatricians and some educators, does not, however, ground very young children’s use in their domestic context—in the spaces and with those people with whom most touch screen usage takes place. With funding from the Australian Research Council Australian, Irish and UK researchers are about to adopt a media studies (domestication) approach to comprehensively investigate digital media use in the everyday lives of very young children. This Australian-based research project positions very young children’s touch screen use within the family and will help provide an understanding of the everyday knowledge and strategies that this cohort of technology users (very young children and their parents) have already developed—in the knowledge vacuum left by the swift appropriation and incorporation of these new media technologies into the lives of families with very young children. Whilst using a conventional social constructionist perspective, the project will also adopt a co-creation of knowledge approach. The co-creation of knowledge approach (Fong) has links with the communities of practice literature (Wegner) and recognises that parents, care-givers and the children themselves are the current experts in this field in terms of the everyday uses of these technologies by very young children. Families’ everyday discourse and practices regarding their children’s touch screen use do not necessarily work through obvious power hierarchies (via expert opinions), but rather through a process of meaning making where they shape their own understandings and attitudes through experience and shared talk within their own everyday family communities of practice. This Toddlers and Tablets research is innovative in many ways. It seeks to capture the enthusiasm of young children’s digital interactions and to pioneer new ways of ‘beginnings’ researching with very young children, as well as with their parents. The researchers will work with parents and children in their broad domestic contexts (including in and out-of-home activities, and grandparental and wider-family involvement) to co-create knowledge about young children’s digital technologies and the social contexts in which these technologies are used. Aspects of these interactions, such as interviews and observations of everyday digital interactions will be recorded (audio and video respectively). In addition to this, data collected from media commentary, policy debates, research publications and learned articles from other disciplinary traditions will be interrogated to see if there are correlations, contrasts, trends or synergies between parents’ construction of meaning, public commentary and current research. Critical discourse tools and methods (Chouliaraki and Fairclough) will be used to analyse verbatim transcripts, video, and all written materials. Conclusion Very young children are uniquely dependent upon others for the basic necessities of life and for the tools they need, and will need to develop, to claim their place in the world. Given the ubiquitous role played by digital media in the lives of their parents and other caregivers it would be a distortion of everyday life for children to be excluded from the technologies that are routinely used to connect with other people and with information. In the same way that adults use digital media to renew and strengthen social and emotional bonds across distance, so young children delight in ‘Facetime’ and other technologies that connect them audio-visually with friends and family members who are not physically co-present. Similarly, a very short time spent in the company of toddlers using touch screens is sufficient to demonstrate the sheer delight that these young infants have in developing their sense of agency and autonomy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk). Media, communications and cultural studies are beginning to claim a space for evidence based policy drawn from everyday activities in real life contexts. Research into the beginnings of digital life, with families who are beginning to find a way to introduce these technologies to the youngest generation, integrating them within social and emotional repertoires, may prove to be the start of new understandings into the communication skills of the preverbal and preliterate young people whose technology preferences will drive future development – with their parents likely trying to keep pace. Acknowledgment This research is supported under Australia Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP150104734). References Bittman, Michael, et al. "Digital Natives? New and Old Media and Children's Outcomes." Australian Journal of Education 55.2 (2011): 161-75. Brown, Ari. "Media Use by Children Younger than 2 Years." Pediatrics 128.5 (2011): 1040-45. Burr, Vivien. Social Constructionism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Cavanaugh, Cathy, et al. "The Effects of Distance Education on K–12 Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis." Naperville, Ill.: Learning Point Associates, 2004. 5 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.ncrel.org/tech/distance/index.html›. Child Sciences and Parenting Research Office. Survey of Media Use by Children and Parents (Summary). Tokyo: Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute, 2014. Coenena, Pieter, Erin Howiea, Amity Campbella, and Leon Strakera. Mobile Touch Screen Device Use among Young Australian Children–First Results from a National Survey. Proceedings 19th Triennial Congress of the IEA. 2015. Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman Fairclough. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Department of Education. "Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia." Australian Government, 2009. Ferguson, Christopher J., and M. Brent Donnellan. "Is the Association between Children’s Baby Video Viewing and Poor Language Development Robust? A Reanalysis of Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff (2007)." Developmental Psychology 50.1 (2014): 129. Findahl, Olle. Swedes and the Internet 2013. Stockholm: The Internet Infrastructure Foundation, 2013. Fong, Patrick S.W. "Co-Creation of Knowledge by Multidisciplinary Project Teams." Management of Knowledge in Project Environments. Eds. E. Love, P. Fong, and Z. Irani. Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2005. 41-56. Gates, Bill. "Enter 'Generation I': The Responsibility to Provide Access for All to the Most Incredible Learning Tool Ever Created." Instructor 109.6 (2000): 98. Goh, Wendy W.L., Susanna Bay, and Vivian Hsueh-Hua Chen. "Young School Children’s Use of Digital Devices and Parental Rules." Telematics and Informatics 32.4 (2015): 787-95. Green, Lelia, et al. "Risks and Safety for Australian Children on the Internet: Full Findings from the AU Kids Online Survey of 9-16 Year Olds and Their Parents." Cultural Science Journal 4.1 (2011): 1-73. Holloway, Donell, Lelia Green, and Carlie Love. "'It's All about the Apps': Parental Mediation of Pre-Schoolers' Digital Lives." Media International Australia 153 (2014): 148-56. Hourcade, Juan Pablo, Sarah Mascher, David Wu, and Luiza Pantoja. Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of YouTube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using Tablets. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2015. Jie S.H. "ICT Use Statistics of Households and Individuals in Korea." 10th World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Meeting (WTIM-12). Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), 25-7 Sep. 2012.Judge, Sharon, Kathleen Puckett, and Sherry Mee Bell. "Closing the Digital Divide: Update from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study." The Journal of Educational Research 100.1 (2006): 52-60. Kirkorian, H., K. Choi, and Pempek. "Toddlers' Word Learning from Contingent and Non-Contingent Video on Touchscreens." Child Development (in press). Leathers, Heather, Patti Summers, and Desollar. Toddlers on Technology: A Parents' Guide. Illinois: AuthorHouse, 2013. NAEYC. Technology and Interactive Media as Tools in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8 [Position Statement]. Washington: National Association for the Education of Young Children, the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College, 2012. Neumann, Michelle M. "An Examination of Touch Screen Tablets and Emergent Literacy in Australian Pre-School Children." Australian Journal of Education 58.2 (2014): 109-22. Ofcom. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report. London, 2013. Rideout, Victoria. Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013. San Francisco: Common Sense Media, 2013. Rosin, Hanna. "The Touch-Screen Generation." The Atlantic, 20 Apr. 2013. Strasburger, Victor C., et al. "Children, Adolescents, and the Media." Pediatrics 132.5 (2013): 958-61. Unantenne, Nalika. Mobile Device Usage among Young Kids: A Southeast Asia Study. Singapore: The Asian Parent and Samsung Kids Time, 2014. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wenger, Etienne. "Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems." Organization 7.2 (2000): 225-46. Yelland, Nicola. "Which Apps Are Educational and Why? It’s in the Eye of the Beholder." The Conversation 13 July 2015. 16 Aug. 2015 ‹http://theconversation.com/which-apps-are-educational-and-why-its-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-37968›.

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While the television cooking genre has evolved in numerous ways to withstand competition and become a constant feature in television programming (Collins and College), it has been argued that audience demand for televisual cooking has always been high because of the daily importance of cooking (Hamada, “Multimedia Integration”). Early cooking shows were characterised by an instructional discourse, before quickly embracing an entertainment focus; modern cooking shows take on a more competitive, out of the kitchen focus (Collins and College). The genre has continued to evolve, with celebrity chefs and ordinary people embracing transmedia affordances to return to the instructional focus of the early cooking shows. While the television cooking show is recognised for its broad cultural impacts related to gender (Ouellette and Hay), cultural capital (Ibrahim; Oren), television formatting (Oren), and even communication itself (Matwick and Matwick), its role in the widespread adoption of television captions is significantly underexplored. Even the fact that a cooking show was the first ever program captioned on American television is almost completely unremarked within cooking show histories and literature.A Brief History of Captioning WorldwideWhen captions were first introduced on US television in the early 1970s, programmers were guided by the general principle to make the captioned program “accessible to every deaf viewer regardless of reading ability” (Jensema, McCann and Ramsey 284). However, there were no exact rules regarding captioning quality and captions did not reflect verbatim what was said onscreen. According to Jensema, McCann and Ramsey (285), less than verbatim captioning continued for many years because “deaf people were so delighted to have captions that they accepted almost anything thrown on the screen” (see also Newell 266 for a discussion of the UK context).While the benefits of captions for people who are D/deaf or hard of hearing were immediate, its commercial applications also became apparent. When the moral argument that people who were D/deaf or hard of hearing had a right to access television via captions proved unsuccessful in the fight for legislation, advocates lobbied the US Congress about the mainstream commercial benefits such as in education and the benefits for people learning English as a second language (Downey). Activist efforts and hard-won legal battles meant D/deaf and hard of hearing viewers can now expect closed captions on almost all television content. With legislation in place to determine the provision of captions, attention began to focus on their quality. D/deaf viewers are no longer just delighted to accept anything thrown on the screen and have begun to demand verbatim captioning. At the same time, market-based incentives are capturing the attention of television executives seeking to make money, and the widespread availability of verbatim captions has been recognised for its multimedia—and therefore commercial—applications. These include its capacity for information retrieval (Miura et al.; Agnihotri et al.) and for creative repurposing of television content (Blankinship et al.). Captions and transcripts have been identified as being of particular importance to augmenting the information provided in cooking shows (Miura et al.; Oh et al.).Early Captions in the US: Julia Child’s The French ChefJulia Child is indicative of the early period of the cooking genre (Collins and College)—she has been described as “the epitome of the TV chef” (ray 53) and is often credited for making cooking accessible to American audiences through her onscreen focus on normalising techniques that she promised could be mastered at home (ray). She is still recognised for her mastery of the genre, and for her capacity to entertain in a way that stood out from her contemporaries (Collins and College; ray).Julia Child’s The French Chef originally aired on the US publicly-funded Public Broadcasting System (PBS) affiliate WBGH from 1963–1973. The captioning of television also began in the 1960s, with educators creating the captions themselves, mainly for educational use in deaf schools (Downey 70). However, there soon came calls for public television to also be made accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing—the debate focused on equality and pushed for recognition that deaf people were culturally diverse (Downey 70).The PBS therefore began a trial of captioning programs (Downey 71). These would be “open captions”—characters which were positioned on the screen as part of the normal image for all viewers to see (Downey 71). The trial was designed to determine both the number of D/deaf and hard of hearing people viewing the program, as well as to test if non-D/deaf and hard of hearing viewers would watch a program which had captions (Downey 71). The French Chef was selected for captioning by WBGH because it was their most popular television show in the early 1970s and in 1972 eight episodes of The French Chef were aired using open—albeit inconsistent—captions (Downey 71; Jensema et al. 284).There were concerns from some broadcasters that openly captioned programs would drive away the “hearing majority” (Downey 71). However, there was no explicit study carried out in 1972 on the viewers of The French Chef to determine if this was the case because WBGH ran out of funds to research this further (Downey 71). Nevertheless, Jensema, McCann and Ramsey (284) note that WBGH did begin to re-broadcast ABC World News Tonight in the 1970s with open captions and that this was the only regularly captioned show at the time.Due to changes in technology and fears that not everyone wanted to see captions onscreen, television’s focus shifted from open captions to closed captioning in the 1980s. Captions became encoded, with viewers needing a decoder to be able to access them. However, the high cost of the decoders meant that many could not afford to buy them and adoption of the technology was slow (Youngblood and Lysaght 243; Downey 71). In 1979, the US government had set up the National Captioning Institute (NCI) with a mandate to develop and sell these decoders, and provide captioning services to the networks. This was initially government-funded but was designed to eventually be self-sufficient (Downey 73).PBS, ABC and NBC (but not CBS) had agreed to a trial (Downey 73). However, there was a reluctance on the part of broadcasters to pay to caption content when there was not enough evidence that the demand was high (Downey 73—74). The argument for the provision of captioned content therefore began to focus on the rights of all citizens to be able to access a public service. A complaint was lodged claiming that the Los Angeles station KCET, which was a PBS affiliate, did not provide captioned content that was available elsewhere (Downey 74). When Los Angeles PBS station KCET refused to air captioned episodes of The French Chef, the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness (GLAD) picketed the station until the decision was reversed. GLAD then focused on legislation and used the Rehabilitation Act to argue that television was federally assisted and, by not providing captioned content, broadcasters were in violation of the Act (Downey 74).GLAD also used the 1934 Communications Act in their argument. This Act had firstly established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and then assigned them the right to grant and renew broadcast licenses as long as those broadcasters served the ‘‘public interest, convenience, and necessity’’ (Michalik, cited in Downey 74). The FCC could, argued GLAD, therefore refuse to renew the licenses of broadcasters who did not air captioned content. However, rather than this argument working in their favour, the FCC instead changed its own procedures to avoid such legal actions in the future (Downey 75). As a result, although some stations began to voluntarily caption more content, it was not until 1996 that it became a legally mandated requirement with the introduction of the Telecommunications Act (Youngblood and Lysaght 244)—too late for The French Chef.My Kitchen Rules: Captioning BreachWhereas The French Chef presented instructional cooking programming from a kitchen set, more recently the food genre has moved away from the staged domestic kitchen set as an instructional space to use real-life domestic kitchens and more competitive multi-bench spaces. The Australian program MKR straddles this shift in the cooking genre with the first half of each season occurring in domestic settings and the second half in Iron Chef style studio competition (see Oren for a discussion of the influence of Iron Chef on contemporary cooking shows).All broadcast channels in Australia are mandated to caption 100 per cent of programs aired between 6am and midnight. However, the 2013 MKR Grand Final broadcast by Channel Seven Brisbane Pty Ltd and Channel Seven Melbourne Pty Ltd (Seven) failed to transmit 10 minutes of captions some 30 minutes into the 2-hour program. The ACMA received two complaints relating to this. The first complaint, received on 27 April 2013, the same evening as the program was broadcast, noted ‘[the D/deaf community] … should not have to miss out’ (ACMA, Report No. 3046 3). The second complaint, received on 30 April 2013, identified the crucial nature of the missing segment and its effect on viewers’ overall enjoyment of the program (ACMA, Report No. 3046 3).Seven explained that the relevant segment (approximately 10 per cent of the program) was missing from the captioning file, but that it had not appeared to be missing when Seven completed its usual captioning checks prior to broadcast (ACMA, Report No. 3046 4). The ACMA found that Seven had breached the conditions of their commercial television broadcasting licence by “failing to provide a captioning service for the program” (ACMA, Report No. 3046 12). The interruption of captioning was serious enough to constitute a breach due, in part, to the nature and characteristic of the program:the viewer is engaged in the momentum of the competitive process by being provided with an understanding of each of the competition stages; how the judges, guests and contestants interact; and their commentaries of the food and the cooking processes during those stages. (ACMA, Report No. 3046 6)These interactions have become a crucial part of the cooking genre, a genre often described as offering a way to acquire cultural capital via instructions in both cooking and ideological food preferences (Oren 31). Further, in relation to the uncaptioned MKR segment, ACMA acknowledged it would have been difficult to follow both the cooking process and the exchanges taking place between contestants (ACMA, Report No. 3046 8). ACMA considered these exchanges crucial to ‘a viewer’s understanding of, and secondly to their engagement with the different inter-related stages of the program’ (ACMA, Report No. 3046 7).An additional complaint was made with regards to the same program broadcast on Prime Television (Northern) Pty Ltd (Prime), a Seven Network affiliate. The complaint stated that the lack of captions was “Not good enough in prime time and for a show that is non-live in nature” (ACMA, Report No. 3124 3). Despite the fact that the ACMA found that “the fault arose from the affiliate, Seven, rather than from the licensee [Prime]”, Prime was also found to also have breached their licence conditions by failing to provide a captioning service (ACMA, Report No. 3124 12).The following year, Seven launched captions for their online catch-up television platform. Although this was a result of discussions with a complainant over the broader lack of captioned online television content, it was also a step that re-established Seven’s credentials as a leader in commercial television access. The 2015 season of MKR also featured their first partially-deaf contestant, Emilie Biggar.Mainstreaming Captions — Inter-Platform CooperationOver time, cooking shows on television have evolved from an informative style (The French Chef) to become more entertaining in their approach (MKR). As Oren identifies, this has seen a shift in the food genre “away from the traditional, instructional format and towards professionalism and competition” (Oren 25). The affordances of television itself as a visual medium has also been recognised as crucial in the popularity of this genre and its more recent transmedia turn. That is, following Joshua Meyrowitz’s medium theory regarding how different media can afford us different messages, televised cooking shows offer audiences stylised knowledge about food and cooking beyond the traditional cookbook (Oren; ray). In addition, cooking shows are taking their product beyond just television and increasing their inter-platform cooperation (Oren)—for example, MKR has a comprehensive companion website that viewers can visit to watch whole episodes, obtain full recipes, and view shopping lists. While this can be viewed as a modern take on Julia Child’s cookbook success, it must also be considered in the context of the increasing focus on multimedia approaches to cooking instructions (Hamada et al., Multimedia Integration; Cooking Navi; Oh et al.). Audiences today are more likely to attempt a recipe if they have seen it on television, and will use transmedia to download the recipe. As Oren explains:foodism’s ascent to popular culture provides the backdrop and motivation for the current explosion of food-themed formats that encourages audiences’ investment in their own expertise as critics, diners, foodies and even wanna-be professional chefs. FoodTV, in turn, feeds back into a web-powered, gastro-culture and critique-economy where appraisal outranks delight. (Oren 33)This explosion in popularity of the web-powered gastro culture Oren refers to has led to an increase in appetite for step by step, easy to access instructions. These are being delivered using captions. As a result of the legislation and activism described throughout this paper, captions are more widely available and, in many cases, now describe what is said onscreen verbatim. In addition, the mainstream commercial benefits and uses of captions are being explored. Captions have therefore moved from a specialist assistive technology for people who are D/deaf or hard of hearing to become recognised as an important resource for creative television viewers regardless of their hearing (Blankinship et al.). With captions becoming more accessible, accurate, financially viable, and mainstreamed, their potential as an additional television resource is of interest. As outlined above, within the cooking show genre—especially with its current multimedia turn and the demand for captioned recipe instructions (Hamada et al., “Multimedia Integration”, “Cooking Navi”; Oh et al.)—this is particularly pertinent.Hamada et al. identify captions as a useful technology to use in the increasingly popular educational, yet entertaining, cooking show genre as the required information—ingredient lists, instructions, recipes—is in high demand (Hamada et al., “Multimedia Integration” 658). They note that cooking shows often present information out of order, making them difficult to follow, particularly if a recipe must be sourced later from a website (Hamada et al., “Multimedia Integration” 658-59; Oh et al.). Each step in a recipe must be navigated and coordinated, particularly if multiple recipes are being completed at the same times (Hamada, et al., Cooking Navi) as is often the case on cooking shows such as MKR. Using captions as part of a software program to index cooking videos facilitates a number of search affordances for people wishing to replicate the recipe themselves. As Kyeong-Jin et al. explain:if food and recipe information are published as linked data with the scheme, it enables to search food recipe and annotate certain recipe by communities (sic). In addition, because of characteristics of linked data, information on food recipes can be connected to additional data source such as products for ingredients, and recipe websites can support users’ decision making in the cooking domain. (Oh et al. 2)The advantages of such a software program are many. For the audience there is easy access to desired information. For the number of commercial entities involved, this consumer desire facilitates endless marketing opportunities including product placement, increased ratings, and software development. Interesting, all of this falls outside the “usual” parameters of captions as purely an assistive device for a few, and facilitates the mainstreaming—and perhaps beginnings of acceptance—of captions.ConclusionCaptions are a vital accessibility feature for television viewers who are D/deaf or hard of hearing, not just from an informative or entertainment perspective but also to facilitate social inclusion for this culturally diverse group. The availability and quality of television captions has moved through three stages. These can be broadly summarised as early yet inconsistent captions, captions becoming more widely available and accurate—often as a direct result of activism and legislation—but not yet fully verbatim, and verbatim captions as adopted within mainstream software applications. This paper has situated these stages within the television cooking genre, a genre often remarked for its appeal towards inclusion and cultural capital.If television facilitates social inclusion, then food television offers vital cultural capital. While Julia Child’s The French Chef offered the first example of television captions via open captions in 1972, a lack of funding means we do not know how viewers (both hearing and not) actually received the program. However, at the time, captions that would be considered unacceptable today were received favourably (Jensema, McCann and Ramsey; Newell)—anything was deemed better than nothing. Increasingly, as the focus shifted to closed captioning and the cooking genre embraced a more competitive approach, viewers who required captions were no longer happy with missing or inconsistent captioning quality. The was particularly significant in Australia in 2013 when several viewers complained to ACMA that captions were missing from the finale of MKR. These captions provided more than vital cooking instructions—their lack prevented viewers from understanding conflict within the program. Following this breach, Seven became the only Australian commercial television station to offer captions on their web based catch-up platform. While this may have gone a long way to rehabilitate Seven amongst D/deaf and hard of hearing audiences, there is the potential too for commercial benefits. Caption technology is now being mainstreamed for use in cooking software applications developed from televised cooking shows. These allow viewers—both D/deaf and hearing—to access information in a completely new, and inclusive, way.ReferencesAgnihotri, Lalitha, et al. “Summarization of Video Programs Based on Closed Captions.” 4315 (2001): 599–607.Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Investigation Report No. 3046. 2013. 26 Apr. 2017 <http://www.acma.gov.au/~/media/Diversity%20Localism%20and%20Accessibility/Investigation%20reports/Word%20document/3046%20My%20Kitchen%20Rules%20Grand%20Final%20docx.docx>.———. Investigation Report No. 3124. 2014. 26 Apr. 2017 <http://www.acma.gov.au/~/media/Diversity%20Localism%20and%20Accessibility/Investigation%20reports/Word%20document/3124%20NEN%20My%20Kitchen%20Rules%20docx.docx>.Blankinship, E., et al. “Closed Caption, Open Source.” BT Technology Journal 22.4 (2004): 151–59.Collins, Kathleen, and John Jay College. “TV Cooking Shows: The Evolution of a Genre”. Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture (7 May 2008). 14 May 2017 <http://www.flowjournal.org/2008/05/tv-cooking-shows-the-evolution-of-a-genre/>.Downey, Greg. “Constructing Closed-Captioning in the Public Interest: From Minority Media Accessibility to Mainstream Educational Technology.” The Journal of Policy, Regulation and Strategy for Telecommunications, Information and Media 9.2/3 (2007): 69–82. DOI: 10.1108/14636690710734670.Hamada, Reiko, et al. “Multimedia Integration for Cooking Video Indexing.” Advances in Multimedia Information Processing-PCM 2004 (2005): 657–64.Hamada, Reiko, et al. “Cooking Navi: Assistant for Daily Cooking in Kitchen.” Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia. ACM.Ibrahim, Yasmin. “Food p*rn and the Invitation to Gaze: Ephemeral Consumption and the Digital Spectacle.” International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP) 6.3 (2015): 1–12.Jensema, Carl J., Ralph McCann, and Scott Ramsey. “Closed-Captioned Television Presentation Speed and Vocabulary.” American Annals of the Deaf 141.4 (1996): 284–292.Matwick, Kelsi, and Keri Matwick. “Inquiry in Television Cooking Shows.” Discourse & Communication 9.3 (2015): 313–30.Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.Miura, K., et al. “Automatic Generation of a Multimedia Encyclopedia from TV Programs by Using Closed Captions and Detecting Principal Video Objects.” Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (2006): 873–80.Newell, A.F. “Teletext for the Deaf.” Electronics and Power 28.3 (1982): 263–66.Oh, K.J. et al. “Automatic Indexing of Cooking Video by Using Caption-Recipe Alignment.” 2014 International Conference on Behavioral, Economic, and Socio-Cultural Computing (BESC2014) (2014): 1–6.Oren, Tasha. “On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition as Television Values.” Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 8.2 (2013): 20–35.Ouellette, Laurie, and James Hay. “Makeover Television, Governmentality and the Good Citizen.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22.4 (2008): 471–84.ray, krishnendu. “Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American Television.” Gastronomica 7.1 (2007): 50–63.Youngblood, Norman E., and Ryan Lysaght. “Accessibility and Use of Online Video Captions by Local Television News Websites.” Electronic News 9.4 (2015): 242–256.

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Men in crisis Confused by society's mixed messages about what's expected of them as boys, and later as men, many feel a sadness and disconnection they cannot even name. (Pollack 1) The recent 'crisis in masculinity' has been punctuated by a plethora of material devoted to reclaiming men's 'lost' power within a society. Triggered by the recognition that their roles within our society are changing, this emerging cannon often fails to recognise men as part of a social continuum that subjectifies individuals within discursive frameworks. Rather it mourns this process as the emasculation of male identity within our culture. However, this self-help rhetoric masks a wider project of renegotiating men's power within our society. David Buchbinder for example, calls for an interrogation of "how men and various masculinities are represented" (7). As a consequence, male subjectivities are being called into question. There is now examination of the manner in which "power is differentiated so that particular styles of masculinity become ascendant…in certain situations" (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 52). In this way, male power is being problematised on many fronts. The desire to shore-up male power in the face of various 'threats' has called for a corporeal manifestation of masculine dominance. Men's bodies have been redefined through contemporary attention to physical sculpting and molding. This reanimation of the Superman ethic of embodiment is part of the hegemonic maintenance of masculine power in our culture. At the times of the greatest threat to male competence and control within society - social, political and economic restructuring, war and recovery - the body has been at the frontier of reasserting male power. This paper traces performances of superhero masculinity across men's bodies. As central 'creators' of their world, superheroes embody a mythology in masculine identity that shapes men as social and natural determinists within a society. In attempting to replicate this role, men are subjected to a rupture in the social fabric whereby their bodies move through a series of discursive frameworks in a contradictory tapestry that activates a 'crisis' within masculine identity. This paper seeks to open the seam between masculinity and power to examine how masculine legitimacy is negotiated on embodied surfaces. This trajectory is constantly stretched to its limits where men's bodies are in a persistent state of rebuilding. Henry Rollins forms part of the frayed edges of superhero identity. Simultaneously validating and undermining this mentality, Rollins creates a nexus of contradictory ideologies. Embracing a "rock-hard male body" (Robinson 11) in a powerfully built embodied reality, and at the same time deconstructing it, Rollins takes issue with men in their mythological role as centres of social reality and their power to create and control it. Rollins forms an identity that is shaped within discursive practices rather than the director of them. In tracing this performance through the "Liar" music video that features Rollins in the Superman role, this paper demonstrates the convoluted masculinity embraced by Rollins and the movement of Superman across his body. Between superheroes, war and bodybuilding, the aim is to trace how men are positioned as unproblematic agents of power, change and creation within the embodied myths of our culture. Bodies of knowledge Men's bodies have changed. While they have been the 'normal' against which women's bodies have been defined, this sense of normality has altered (Cranny-Francis 8). Foucault has consistently demonstrated how bodies are created and inscribed through cultural processes whereby discourses determine the shape and nature of embodied realities. Even though men are often centralised in these knowledge systems, it does not mean that they are immune to their influence. Men are insistently defined through metaphors of the mind. The proper man is a controlled man. In bodybuilding this relationship is activated in the repetitive and disciplined action of tensing and relaxing muscle. Defined as, "the toning and accentuating of muscles by the repeated action of flexing and releasing…particularly through the use of weights" (Carden-Coyne n.pag), it reifies a controlled mind restraining and shaping the physical form. During the Enlightenment thrust toward scientific rationalism, Descartes positioned an uncomplicated division between the mind and the body. Men spent their time purifying their souls and using bodies "as a spiritual vessel, a Christian container of morality and purity" (Carden-Coyne n.pag). They were shells that required discipline so the mind was not led astray. The mind was the controlling agent that subdued a disobedient embodiment. The extent to which this was achieved was the measure of the legitimacy and competence of a man. The currency of this corporeal state resonates most potently today through the phallus. As an extension of the phallus, the surface of the male body is a crucial site for the demonstration of embodied control. For the phallus is not very closely related to the possession of a penis as David Buchbinder argues when he suggests, "the phallus as a symbol, however, is not to be identified with an actual penis, because no actual penis could ever really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus" (49). Indeed, men's penises are "flaccid most of the time" (Buchbinder 48). They are fragile and soft. They rarely meet the 'supernatural' prowess of the phallus. Phallic power is related to the capacity to occupy the space of symbolic power effectively - to be embodied in a competent masculinity. Bodybuilding demonstrates a mastery over the self that articulates this discipline. The capacity to mobilise this control is linked to wider social power in which men are supposed to be privileged agents of creation and control in the political and economic spheres of life. Henry Rollins mobilises a mythos of masculine embodied control and corporeal hardness in his embrace of Superman. He is the epitome of phallic power and Rollins uses this character as a metonym to articulate the contradictions between the ideologies circulating through culture and the reality of lived experience. While Rollins mobilises a superhero musculature, the surfacing of his self masks a vulnerable masculine subjectivity that is embedded within distinct social frameworks. He uses the ideologies surrounding superheroes to create a dialogue between the reality of everyday life and the discourses that frame those experiences. Superheroes are resourceful, disciplined and righteous. They are sites of strength, moral virtue, creation and control. They often have super-powers, super-human strength, agility or speed that enables them to exist apart from regular humans. They occupy spaces removed from everyday life. However, their separateness from these realities is contrary to real men's experiences. Like the phallus, there is a gulf between the superhero ideology that men are supposed to embody and the reality of lived experience. Nevertheless there remains a constant struggle to build and rebuild the male body to the pinnacle of (super)masculine prowess. Superman is framed within the mind/body binary quite clearly. The control he exercises over his body reifies his calm and disciplined mind. His powerful physique, "represents in vividly graphic detail the masculinity, the confidence, the power that personifies the ideal of phallic masculinity" (Brown n.pag). His control extends across his self and out into the world. Rollins embraces this control through his own self-empowering rhetoric that litters his lyrics, spoken word and concert performances. He also most clearly embodies the Superman ideology through a life-long attention to bodybuilding. Introduced to weightlifting as a teenager, Rollins incorporates the Superman ideology into his subjectivity. He has been referred to as the "tattooed, muscled Ubermensch of serious rawk" (geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/4396/hrf.htm). He works his muscles to rebuild his identity after a disaffiliated, Ritalin-addicted childhood spent bouncing between divorced parents. The processes of disciplining his body and empowering the self are made clear through his relationship to his body and to the weights. Rollins believes in extending himself to his limits and beyond. Bodybuilding is the mattering map Rollins uses to construct a sense of self. He uses it to define who he is and to build his self-esteem. For example,"time away from the Iron makes my mind and body degenerate. I turn on myself and wallow in thick depression that makes me unable to function. The body shuts my mind down. The Iron is the best anti-depressant I have ever found. No better way to fight weakness than with strength. Fight degeneration with generation" (Rollins 257). In his embrace of the embodied power of Superman and the building mechanisms of weightlifting he is able to repair and regenerate his sense of self. He is able to transform himself into something new and different, thereby exercising power as an agent of change. This ethic of rebuilding hails an earlier time when control over the body needed to reestablish the coherent corporeality of damaged men within a culture. World War One redefined popular consciousness of men's bodies as the mechanisation of warfare ripped limbs from torsos and severed the relationship between a disciplined mind and the controlled body. Rebuilding battered bodies The first widespread conflict to use guns, shells and tanks produced the first evidence of neurasthenia, or shell shock (Carden-Coyne n.pag). Faith in evolution and human improvement was shaken to its core with the appearance of physically and emotionally broken masculinity. Men's bodies were dismembered and disabled - their minds were tortured. As a result Carden-Coyne argues, [t]he first world war significantly undermined confidence in the male instinct, by demonstrating that the primitive energies of the male body (virility, physical strength and aggression) were no match for modern technological warfare. A process of healing was needed to rebuild a masculinity of control and strength in these men. Faith in progress needed to be renegotiated and the damaged minds and bodies of men mended. Bodybuilding was seen as the most complete demonstration of embodied control. It required discipline and strength and so required the mind to order the body. Bodybuilding was embraced after World War One to repair the fissures in war-ravaged masculinity. It served, "to shape corporeal borders…against the sense of decay and uncertainty that permeated the 'air' of modernity" (Carden-Coyne n.pag). The strong body created a strong mind and bodybuilding in the post-war period also helped to more popularly render images of heroes. War heroes could be more easily framed in musculature. In popular culture, heroes shifted from aristocratic figures such as the Scarlet Pimpernel, to more everyday men. By 1938 the emergence of Superman comics positioned the ordinary-like man as superhero (Bridwell 6). The hard body had the capacity to make the ordinary man exceptional. Indeed, the superheroes of the twentieth century like "Tarzan, Conan, James Bond" (Connell 6) all depict a resilience and similar competence over all aspects of their lives. However as men's authority has been increasingly challenged within our society, embodied strength has increased in Superman to mirror the changes in the lives of these men. Postmodern paychecks World War Two also tore men's bodies apart. However with this war, the machine was reinscribed as saving rather than taking lives on the battlefield (Fussell 3). The development of the atomic bomb was attributed to, and celebrated as, man's ability to create and conquer anything (Easlea 90). By 1950 Superman comics depicted the man of steel withstanding a nuclear blast thereby validating the superiority and resilience of white, western masculinity and embodied hardness over the weak Others (Bridwell 10). Nevertheless World War Two chewed through men's bodies at an imperceptible rate. Despite the rhetoric of heroism and technological superiority, the reality of everyday battle was broken bodies. The ideology of the superhero served to mask the realities of this war. Despite the damage to the corporeal form, the heroic mythology of masculine identity served to reify a coherent embodiment and a clear mind. The mobilisation of this masculine myth masked the erosion of legitimate male power within culture. This resonates into the postwar period where a whole series of structural changes to the social landscape have radically redefined our social reality. The mechanisms men have used to define themselves have decayed. The rising empowerment of women, gay men and black men have problematised the centrality of white, heterosexual men in our culture (Faludi 40). They are no longer able to easily occupy a stable, silent centre in our society. As a result, there has been an attempt to reclaim the body and reclaim the competency that serves to define men as masculine. The rising interest in men's health and physical fitness on the whole, has lead to a reanimation of the superman figure. Men's bodies are getting harder and larger. Part animal, part machine Henry Rollins embraces the contradictions in heroic masculinity. He demonstrates an embodied control that is regimented through an incorporation of Nietzschean will. In this way he embodies the relationship between the superhero and contemporary masculinity. However, Rollins' Superman is not an Ubermensch (Nietzsche 230). He performs a problematic masculinity. As a result, Rollins deconstructs the masculine hierarchy by subverting, not only his own performance of masculinity, but all such performances. The "Liar" music video by The Rollins Band features Rollins in the Superman role. In this clip he interrogates different levels of truth and reality. For him, neither Clark Kent nor Superman is a valid model on which to base effective performances of masculinity. Neither of these men are heroes, rather they are simulations. The version of Superman that Rollins constructs is authoritative and totalitarian. He depicts a corrupt figure and flawed leader who is not in control and is struggling to meet the demands of his role. This performance of Superman deconstructs the myth of the male hero. For Rollins, this hero does not exist - or if he does - he is a "Liar". Henry Rollins both embodies and deconstructs the superhero identity. He forms a nexus around which contradictory ideologies in masculinity collide and are reworked into a radically subversive critique of the relationship between men and superheroes. For Rollins the superhero mentality masks the complicated ideologies men must negotiate everyday in which they are subjectified within contradictory discursive frameworks that demand multifarious performances. Rollins strips back the layers of masculine power to reveal the ways in which men are embedded within social structures that reflect and affect their reality. In this self-reflexive critique he performs Superman in playful, resistive ways. This Superman does not exist apart from everyday life, but is entrenched within its frameworks that can only produce flawed performances of a social ideal. For Rollins a superhero embodiment cannot wipe away the discourses that encircle men within our culture but is rather a reflection of the extent to which men are embedded within them. In negotiating the difficulties in masculinity, Henry Rollins deprioritises men's roles as super-human agents of control, creation and change within a society. He calls into question the validity of masculine power and reifies the contradictions in manhood. He hails an ultimately resilient and empowered dominant masculinity within a deconstructive rhetoric. He is mobilising a moment within our culture where men must redefine who they are. This redefinition must be less concerned with how men can reclaim the power they are currently mourning in the 'crisis of masculinity'. If we are to make lasting change within a Cultural Studies framework then it cannot end, but only begin, with the articulation of a diversity of voices. Deep, structural change can only be made if we examine how a powerful position is able to occupy an unproblematised node of commonsense. Men need to redefine who they are, their bodies, their minds and their performances to position a masculinity that is not separate from society, but that can exist coherently within it. References Bridwell, Nathan. "Introduction." Superman from the Thirties to the Seventies. New York: Bonanza Books, 1971. Brown, James. "Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero." African American Review. 33.1 (1999): expanded academic database [n.pag]. Accessed 9.4.2001. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Carden-Coyne, Anna. "Classical heroism and modern life: Body building and masculinity in the early twentieth century." Journal of Australian Studies. (December 1999): expanded academic database [n.pag] Accessed 9.4.2001. Connell, Robert. "Masculinity, violence and war" in P. Patton and R. Poole (eds.), War/Masculinity. Sydney: Intervention Publications, 1985. Cranny-Francis, Ann. The Body in the Text. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995. Descartes, Rene. Key Philosphical Writings. (Translated by E. Haldane and G. Ross) Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997. Easlea, Brian. Fathering the Unthinkable. London: Pluto Press, 1983. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. London: Routledge, 1973. ---Madness and Civlisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London: Routledge, 1965. ---The Order of Things. London: Vintage, 1972. Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding of Behaviour in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Haywood, Christina and Mac an Ghaill, Martin. "Schooling masculinities" in Martin Mac an Ghaill (ed.), Understanding Masculinities. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996. "I Have Zero Sex Appeal." Melody Maker. (March 29 1997). geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/4396/hrf/htm. Accessed July 30 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 4, The Will to Power, Book One and Two. O. Levy (ed.), London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924. Pollack, William. Real Boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Robinson, Doug. No Less a Man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Rollins, Henry. "The Iron." The Portable Henry Rollins. London: Phoenix House, 1997.

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Creators and Creation Creation is a troubling word today, because it suggests an impossible act, indeed a miracle: the formation of something out of nothing. Today we no longer believe in miracles, yet we see all around us myriad acts which we routinely define as creative. Here, I am not referring to the artistic performances and works of gifted individuals, which have their own genealogy of creativity in the lineages of Western art. Rather, I am referring to the small, personal events that we see within the mediated spaces of the everyday (on the television screen, in magazines and newspapers) where lives are suddenly changed for the better through the consumption of products designed to fulfil our personal desires. In this paper, I want to explore the implications of thinking about everyday creativity as a modern cultural form. I want to suggest that not only is such an impossible possibility possible, but that its meaning has been at the centre of the desire to name, to gain status from, and to market the products of modern industrialisation. Furthermore I want to suggest that beyond any question of marketing rhetoric, we need to attend to this desire as the ghost of a certain kind of immanence which has haunted modernity and its projects from the very beginning, linking the great thoughts of modern philosophy with the lowliest products of modern life. Immanence, Purity and the Cogito In Descartes' famous Discourse on Method, the author-narrator (let's call him Descartes) recounts how he came about the idea of the thinking self or cogito, as the foundation of worldly knowledge: And so because sometimes our senses deceive us, I made up my mind to suppose that they always did. . . . I resolved to pretend that everything that had ever entered my mind was as false as the figments of my dreams. But then as I strove to think of everything false, I realized that, in the very act of thinking everything false, I was aware of myself as something real. (60-61) These well known lines are, of course, the beginnings of a remarkable philosophical enterprise, reaching forward to Husserl and beyond, in which the external world is bracketed, all the better to know it in the name of reason. Through an act of pretence ("I resolved to pretend"), Descartes disavows the external world as the source of certain knowledge, and, turning to the only thing left: the thought of himself—"I was aware of myself as something real"—makes his famous declaration, "I think therefore I am". But what precisely characterises this thinking being, destined to become the cogito of all modernity? Is it purely this act of self-reflection?: Then, from reflecting on the fact that I had doubts, and that consequently my existence was not wholly perfect, it occurred to me to enquire how I learned to think of something more perfect than myself, and it became evident to me that it must be through some nature which was in fact more perfect. (62) Descartes has another thought that "occurred to me" almost at the same moment that he becomes aware of his own thinking self. This second thought makes him aware that the cogito is not complete, requiring yet a further thought, that of a perfection drawn from something "more perfect than myself". The creation of the cogito does not occur, as we might have first surmised, within its own space of self-reflection, but becomes lodged within what might be called, following Deleuze and Guattari, a "plane of immanence" coming from the outside: "The plane of immanence is . . . an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world: it is immanence" (59). Here we are left with a puzzling question: what of this immanence that made him aware of his own imperfection at the very moment of the cogito's inception? Can this immanence be explained away by Descartes' appeal to God as a state of perfection? Or is it the very material upon which the cogito is brought into existence, shaping it towards perfection? We are forced to admit that, irrespective of the source of this perfection, the cogito requires something from the outside which, paradoxically, is already on the inside, in order to create itself as a pure form. Following the contours of Descartes' own writing, we cannot account for modernity purely in terms of self-reflection, if, in the very act of its self-creation, the modern subject is shot through with immanence that comes from the outside. Rather what we must do is describe the various forms this immanence takes. Although there is no necessary link between immanence and perfection (that is, one does not logically depend on the other as its necessary cause) their articulation nevertheless produces something (the cogito for instance). Furthermore, this something is always characterised as a creation. In its modern form, creation is a form of immanence within materiality—a virtualisation of material actuality, that produces idealised states, such as God, freedom, reason, uniqueness, originality, love and perfection. As Bruno Latour has argued, the "modern critical stance" creates unique, pure objects, by purging the material "networks" from which they are formed, of their impurities (11-12). Immanence is characterised by a process of sifting and purification which brings modern objects into existence: "the plane of immanence . . . acts like a sieve" (Deleuze and Guattari 42). The nation, the state, the family, the autonomous subject, and the work of art—all of these are modern when their 'material' is purged of impurities by an immanence that 'comes from the outside' yet is somehow intrinsic to the material itself. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, the modern nation exists by virtue of a capacity to convert strangers into citizens; by purging itself of impurities inhabiting it from within but coming from the outside (63). The modern work of art is created by purging itself of the vulgarities and impurities of everyday life (Berman 30); by reducing its contingent and coincidental elements to a geometrical, punctual or serialised form. The modern nuclear family is created by converting the community-based connections between relatives and friends into a single, internally consistent self-reproducing organism. All of these examples require us to think of creativity as an act which brings something new into existence from within a material base that must be purged and disavowed, but which, simultaneously, must also be retained as its point of departure that it never really leaves. Immanence should not be equated with essence, if by essence we mean a substratum of materiality inherent in things; a quality or quiddity to which all things can be reduced. Rather, immanence is the process whereby things appear as they are to others, thereby forming themselves into 'objects' with certain identifiable characteristics. Immanence draws the 'I' and the 'we' into relations of subjectivity to the objects thus produced. Immanence is not in things; it is the thing's condition of objectivity in a material, spatial and temporal sense; its 'becoming object' before it can be 'perceived' by a subject. As Merleau-Ponty has beautifully argued, seeing as a bodily effect necessarily comes before perception as an inner ownership (Merleau-Ponty 3-14). Since immanence always comes from elsewhere, no intensive scrutiny of the object in itself will bring it to light. But since immanence is already inside the object from the moment of its inception, no amount of examination of its contextual conditions—the social, cultural, economic, institutional and authorial conditions under which the object was created—will bring us any closer to it. Rather, immanence can only be 'seen' (if this is the right word) in terms of the objects it creates. We should stop seeking immanence as a characteristic of objects considered in themselves, and rather see it in terms of a virtual field or plane, in which objects appear, positioned in a transversally related way. This field does not exist transcendentally to the objects, like some overarching principle of order, but as a radically exteriorised stratum of 'immaterial materiality' with a specific image-content, capable of linking objects together as a series of creations, all with the stamp of their own originality, individuality and uniqueness, yet all bound together by a common set of image relations (Deleuze 34-35). If, as Foucault argues, modern objects emerge in a "field of exteriority"—a complex web of discursive interrelations, with contingent rather than necessary connections to one another (Foucault 45)—then it should be possible to map the connections between these objects in terms of the "schema of correspondence" (74) detected in the multiplicities thrown up by the regularities of modern production and consumption. Commodities and Created Objects We can extend the idea of creation to include not only aesthetic acts and their objects, but also the commodity-products of modern industrialisation. Let's begin by plunging straight into the archive, where we might find traces of these small modern miracles. An illustrated advertisem*nt for 'Hudson's Extract of Soap' appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News, on Saturday February 22nd, 1888. The illustration shows a young woman with a washing basket under her arm, standing beside a sign posted to a wall, which reads 'Remarkable Disappearance of all Dirt from Everything by using Hudson's Extract of Soap' (see Figure 1). The woman has her head turned towards the poster, as if reading it. Beneath these words, is another set of words offering a reward: 'Reward !!! Purity, Health, Perfection, Satisfaction. By its regular daily use'. Here we are confronted with a remarkable proposition: soap does not make things clean, rather it makes dirt disappear. Soap purifies things by making their impurities disappear. The claim made applies to 'everything', drawing attention to a desire for a certain state of perfection, exemplified by the pure body, cleansed of dirt and filth. The pure exists in potentia as a perfect state of being, realised by the purgation of impurities. Fig 1: Hudson's Soap. Illustrated Sydney News, on Saturday February 22nd, 1888 Here we might be tempted to trace the motivation of this advertisem*nt to a concern in the nineteenth century for a morally purged, purified body, regulated according to bourgeois values of health, respectability and decorum. As Catherine Gallagher has pointed out, the body in the nineteenth century was at the centre of a sick society requiring "constant flushing, draining, and excising of various deleterious elements" (Gallagher 90). But this is only half the story. The advertisem*nt offers a certain image of purity; an image which exceeds the immediate rhetorical force associated with selling a product, one which cannot be simply reduced to its contexts of use. The image of perfection in the Hudson's soap advertisem*nt belongs to a network of images spread across a far-flung field; a network in which we can 'see' perfection as a material immanence embodied in things. In modernity, commodities are created objects par excellence, which, in their very ordinariness, bear with them an immanence, binding consumers together into consumer formations. Each act of consumption is not simply driven by necessity and need, but by a desire for self-transformation, embodied in the commodity itself. Indeed, self-transformation becomes one of the main creative processes in what Marshal Berman has identified as the "third" phase of modernity, where, paraphrasing Nietzsche, "modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of possibilities" (Berman 21). Commodification shifts human desire away from the thought of the other as a transcendental reality remote from the senses, and onto a future oriented material plane, in which the self is capable of becoming an other in a tangible, specific way (Massumi 35 ff.). By the end of the nineteenth century, commodities had become associated with scenarios of self-transformation embedded in human desire, which then began to shape the needs of society itself. Consumer formations are not autonomous realms; they are transversally located within and across social strata. This is because commodities bear with them an immanence which always exceeds their context of production and consumption, spreading across vast cultural terrains. An individual consumer is thus subject to two forces: the force of production that positions her within the social strata as a member of a class or social grouping, and the force of consumption that draws her away from, or indeed, further into a social positioning. While the consumption of commodities remained bound to ideologies relating to the formation of class in terms of a bourgeois moral order, as it was in Britain, America and Europe throughout the nineteenth century, then the discontinuity between social strata and cultural formation was felt in terms of the possibility of self-transformation by moving up a class. In the nineteenth century, working class families flocked to the new photographic studios to have their portraits taken, emulating the frozen moral rectitude of the ideal bourgeois type, or scrimped and saved to purchase parlour pianos and other such cultural paraphernalia, thereby signalling a certain kind of leisured freedom from the grind of work (Sekula 8). But when the desire for self-transformation starts to outstrip the ideological closure of class; that is, when the 'reality' of commodities starts to overwhelm the social reality of those who make them, then desire itself takes on an autonomy, which can then be attached to multiple images of the other, expressed in imaginary scenarios of escape, freedom, success and hyper-experience. This kind of free-floating desire has now become a major trigger for transformations in consumer formations, linked to visual technologies where images behave like quasi-autonomous beings. The emergence of these images can be traced back at least to the mid-nineteenth century where products of industrialisation were transformed into commodities freely available as spectacles within the public spaces of exhibitions and in mass advertising in the press, for instance in the Great Exhibition of 1851 held at London's Crystal Palace (Richards 28 ff.) Here we see the beginnings of a new kind of object-image dislocated from the utility of the product, with its own exchange value and logic of dispersal. Bataille's notion of symbolic exchange can help explain the logic of dispersal inherent in commodities. For Bataille, capitalism involves both production utility and sumptuary expenditure, where the latter is not simply a calculated version of the former (Bataille 120 ff.) Sumptuary expenditure is a discharge of an excess, and not a drawing in of demand to match the needs of supply. Consumption thus has a certain 'uncontrolled' element embedded in it, which always moves beyond the machinations of market logic. Under these conditions, the commodity image always exceeds production and use, taking on a life of its own, charged with desire. In the late nineteenth century, the convergence of photography and cartes-de-visites released a certain scopophilic desire in the form of postcard p*rnography, which eventually migrated to the modern forms of advertising and public visual imagery that we see today. According to Suren Lalvani, the "onset of scopophilia" in modern society is directly attributable to the convergence of photographic technology and erotic display in the nineteenth century (Lalvani). In modern consumer cultures, desire does not lag behind need, but enters into the cycle of production and consumption from the outside, where it becomes its driving force. In this way, modern consumer cultures transform themselves by ecstasis (literally, by standing outside oneself) when the body becomes virtualised into its other. Here, the desire for self-transformation embodied in the act of consumption intertwines with, and eventually redefines, the social positioning of the subject. Indeed the 'laws' of capital and labour where each person or family group is assigned a place and regime of duties, are constantly undone and redefined by the superfluity of consumption, gradually gathering pace throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These tremendous changes operating throughout all capitalist consumer cultures for some time, do not occur in a calculated way, as if controlled by the forces of production alone. Rather, they occur through myriad acts of self-transformation, operating transversally, linking consumer to consumer within what I have defined earlier as a field of immanence. Here, the laws of supply and demand are inadequate to predict the logic of this operation; they only describe the effects of consumption after desire has been spent. Or, to put this another way, they misread desire as need, thereby transcribing the primary force of consumption into a secondary component of the production/labour cycle. This error is made by Humphrey McQueen in his recent book The Essence of Capitalism: the origins of our future (2001). In chapter 8, McQueen examines the logic of the consumer market through a critique of the marketeer's own notion of desire, embodied in the "sovereign consumer", making rational choices. Here desire is reduced back to a question of calculated demand, situated within the production/consumption cycle. McQueen leaves himself no room to manoeuvre outside this cycle; there is no way to see beyond the capitalist cycle of supply/demand which accelerates across ever-increasing horizons. To avoid this error, desire needs to be seen as immanent to the production/consumption cycle; as produced by it, yet superfluous to its operations. We need therefore to situate ourselves not on the side of production, but in the superfluity of consumption in order to recognise the transformational triggers that characterise modern consumer cultures, and their effects on the social order. In order to understand the creative impulse in modernity today, we need to come to grips with the mystery of consumption, where the thing consumed operates on the consumer in both a material and an immaterial way. This mystification of the commodity was, of course, well noted by Marx: A commodity is . . . a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. (Marx 43, my emphasis) When commodities take on such a powerful force that their very presence starts to drive and shape the social relations that have given rise to them; that is, when desire replaces need as the shaping force of societies, then we are obliged to redefine the commodity and its relation to the subject. Under these conditions, the mystery of the commodity is no longer something to be dispelled in order to retrieve the real relation between labour and capital, but becomes the means whereby "men's labour" is actually shaped and formed as a specific mode of production. Eric Alliez and Michel Feher (1987) point out that in capitalism "the subjection framework which defines the wage relation has penetrated society to such an extent that we can now speak not only of the formal subsumption of labor by capital but of the actual or 'real' subsumption by capital of society as a whole" (345). In post-Fordist economic contexts, individuals' relation to capital is no longer based on subjection but incorporation: "space is subsumed under a time entirely permeated by capital. In so doing, they [neo-Fordist strategies] also instigate a regime in which individuals are less subject to than incorporated by capital" (346). In societies dominated by the subjection of workers to capital, the commodity's exchange value is linked strongly to the classed position of the worker, consolidating his interests within the shadow of a bourgeois moral order. But where the worker is incorporated into capital, his 'real' social relations go with him, making it difficult to see how they can be separated from the commodities he produces and which he also consumes at leisure: "If the capitalist relation has colonized all of the geographical and social space, it has no inside into which to integrate things. It has become an unbounded space—in other words, a space coextensive with its own inside and outside. It has become a field of immanence" (Massumi 18). It therefore makes little sense to initiate critiques of the capital relation by overthrowing the means of subjection. Instead, what is required is a way through the 'incorporation' of the individual into the capitalist system, an appropriation of the means of consumption in order to invent new kinds of selfhood. Or at the very least, to expose the process of self-formation to its own means of consumption. What we need to do, then, is to undertake a description of the various ways in which desire is produced within consumer cultures as a form of self-creation. As we have seen, in modernity, self-creation occurs when human materiality is rendered immaterial through a process purification. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, I have characterised this process in terms of immanence: a force coming from the outside, but which is already inside the material itself. In the necessary absence of any prime mover or deity, pure immanence becomes the primary field in which material is rendered into its various and specific modern forms. Immanence is not a transcendental power operating over things, but that which is the very motor of modernity; its specific way of appearing to itself, and of relating to itself in its various guises and manifestations. Through a careful mapping of the network of commodity images spread through far-flung fields, cutting through specific contexts of production and consumption, we can see creation at work in one of its specific modern forms. Immanence, and the power of creation it makes possible, can be found in all modern things, even soap powder! References Alliez, Eric and Michel Feher. "The Luster of Capital." Zone 1(2) 1987: 314-359. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Penguin, 1982. Bataille, George. "The Notion of Expenditure." George Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Trans. Alan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp.116-129. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method. Trans. Arthur Wollaston, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock, 1972. Gallagher, Catherine. "The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew." The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987: 83-106. Lalvani, Suren. "Photography, Epistemology and the Body." Cultural Studies, 7(3), 1993: 442-465. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Karl. Capital, A New Abridgement. David McLellan (Ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Massumi, Brian. "Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear" in Brian Massumi (Ed.). The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 3-37. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1968. McQueen, Humphrey. The Essence of Capitalism: the Origins of Our Future. Sydney: Sceptre, 2001. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October, 39, 1986: 3-65.

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Abstract:

Introduction Many anthropologists and other academics have attempted to argue that the spread of technology is a global hom*ogenising force, socialising the remaining indigenous groups across the planet into an indistinct Western "monoculture" focussed on consumption, where they are rapidly losing their cultural distinctiveness. In many cases, these intellectuals -– people such as Jerry Mander -- often blame the diffusion of television (particularly through new innovations that are allowing it to penetrate further into rural areas, such as satellite and cable) as a key force in the effort to "assimilate" indigenous groups and eradicate their unique identities. Such writers suggest that indigenous groups can do nothing to resist the onslaught of the technologically, economically, and aesthetically superior power of Western television. Ironically, while often protesting the plight of indigenous groups and heralding their need for cultural survival, these authors often fail to recognise these groups’ abilities to fend for themselves and preserve their cultural integrity. On the other side of the debate are visual anthropologists and others who are arguing that indigenous groups are quickly becoming savvy to Western technologies, and that they are now using them for cultural revitalisation, linguistic revival, and the creation of outlets for the indigenous voice. In this school of thought, technology is seen not so much as a threat to indigenous groups, but instead as a remarkable opportunity to reverse the misfortunes of these groups at the hands of colonisation and national programmes of attempted assimilation. From this perspective, the rush of indigenous groups to adopt new technologies comes hand-in-hand with recent efforts to assert their tribal sovereignty and their independence. Technology has become a "weapon" in their struggle for technological autonomy. As a result, many are starting their own television stations and networks, and thus transforming the way television operates in their societies -– away from global monocultures and toward local interests. I hypothesise that in fact there is no correlation between television viewing and acculturation, and that, in fact, the more familiar people are with the technology of television and the current way the technology is utilised, the more likely they are to be interested in using it to revive and promote their own culture. Whatever slight negative effect exists depends on the degree to which local people can understand and redirect how that technology is used within their own cultural context. However, it should be stated that for terms of this investigation, I consider the technologies of "video" and "television" to be identical. One is the recording aspect, and the other the distribution aspect, of the same technology. Once people become aware that they can control what is on the television screen through the instrumentality of video, they immediately begin attempting to assert cultural values through it. And this is precisely what is going on on the Cheyenne River Reservation. This project is significant because the phenomenon of globalisation is real and Western technologies such as video, radio, and PCs are spreading throughout the world, including the "Fourth World" of the planet’s indigenous peoples. However, in order to deal with the phenomenon of globalisation, anthropologists and others may need to deal more realistically with the phenomenon of technological diffusion, which operates far less simply than they might assume. Well-meaning anthropologists seeking to "protect" indigenous groups from the "invasion" of technologies which will change their way of life may be doing these groups a disservice. If they turned some of their effort away from fending off these technologies and toward teaching indigenous groups how to use them, perhaps they might have a better result in creating a better future for them. I hope this study will show a more productive model for dealing with technological diffusion and what effects it has on cultural change in indigenous societies. There have been very few authors that have dealt with this topic head-on. One of the first to do so was Pace (1993), who suggested that some Brazilian Indians were acculturating more quickly as a result of television finally coming to their remote villages in the 1960s. Molohon (1984) looked at two Cree communities, and found that the one which had more heavy television viewing was culturally closer to its neighboring white towns. Zimmerman (1996) fingered television as one of the key elements in causing Indian teenagers to lose their sense of identity, thus putting them at higher risk for suicide. Gillespie (1995) argued that television is actually a ‘weapon’ of national states everywhere in their efforts to assimilate and socialise indigenous and other ethnic minority groups. In contrast, authors like Weiner (1997), Straubhaar (1991), and Graburn (1982) have all critiqued these approaches, suggesting that they deny subjectivity and critical thinking to indigenous TV audiences. Each of these researchers suggest, based on their field work, that indigenous people are no more likely than anybody else to believe that the things they see on television are true, and no more likely to adopt the values or worldviews promoted by Western TV programmers and advertisers. In fact, Graburn has observed that the Inuit became so disgusted with what they saw on Canadian national television, that they went out and started their own TV network in an effort to provide their people with meaningful alternatives on their screens. Bell (1995) sounds a cautionary note against studies like Graburn’s, noting that the efforts of indigenous New Zealanders to create their own TV programming for local markets failed, largely because they were crowded out by the "media imperialism" of outside international television. Although the indigenous groups there tried to put their own faces on the screen, many local viewers preferred to see the faces of J.R. Ewing and company, and lowered the ratings share of these efforts. Salween (1991) thinks that global media "cultural imperialism" is real -– that it is an objective pursued by international television marketers -– and suggests a media effects approach might be the best way to see whether it works. Woll (1987) notes that historically many ethnic groups have formed their self-images based on the way they have been portrayed onscreen, and that so far these portrayals have been far from sympathetic. In fact, even once these groups started their own cinemas or TV programmes, they unconsciously perpetuated stereotypes first foisted on them by other people. This study tends to side with those who have observed that indigenous people do not tend to "roll over" in the wake of the onslaught of Western television. Although cautionary studies need to be examined carefully, this research will posit that although the dominant forces controlling TV are antithetical to indigenous groups and their goals, the efforts of indigenous people to take control of their TV screens and their own "media literacy" are also increasing. Thus, this study should contribute to the viewpoint that perhaps the best way to save indigenous groups from cultural eradication is to give them access to television and show them how to set up their own stations and distribute their own video programming. In fact, it appears to be the case that TV, the Internet, and electronic 'new media' are helping to foster a process of cultural renewal, not just among the Lakota, but also among the Inuit, the Australian aborigines, and other indigenous groups. These new technologies are helping them renew their native languages, cultural values, and ceremonial traditions, sometimes by giving them new vehicles and forms. Methods The research for this project was conducted on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation headquartered in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Participants chosen for this project were Lakota Sioux who were of the age of consent (18 or older) and who were tribal members living on the reservation. They were given a survey which consisted of five components: a demographic question section identifying their age, gender, and individual data; a technology question section identifying what technologies they had in their home; a TV question section measuring the amount of television they watched; an acculturation question section determining their comparative level of acculturation; and a cultural knowledge question section determining their knowledge of Lakota history. This questionnaire was often followed up by unstructured ethnographic interviews. Thirty-three people of mixed age and gender were given this questionnaire, and for the purposes of this research paper, I focussed primarily on their responses dealing with television and acculturation. These people were chosen through strictly random sampling based on picking addresses at random from the phone book and visiting their houses. The television section asked specifically how many hours of TV they watched per day and per week, what shows they watched, what kinds of shows they preferred, and what rooms in their home had TVs. The acculturation section asked them questions such as how much they used the Lakota language, how close their values were to Lakota values, and how much participation they had in traditional indigenous rituals and customs. To assure open and honest responses, each participant filled out a consent form, and was promised anonymity of their answers. To avoid data contamination, I remained with each person until they completed the questionnaire. For my data analysis, I attempted to determine if there was any correlation (Pearson’s coefficient r of correlation) between such things as hours of TV viewed per week or years of TV ownership with such things as the number of traditional ceremonies they attended in the past year, the number of non-traditional Lakota values they had, their fluency in the Lakota language, their level of cultural knowledge, or the number of traditional practices and customs they had engaged in in their lives. Through simple statistical tests, I determined whether television viewing had any impact on these variables which were reasonable proxies for level of acculturation. Findings Having chosen two independent variables, hours of TV watched per week, and years of TV ownership, I tested if there was any significant correlation between them and the dependent variables of Lakota peoples’ level of cultural knowledge, participation in traditional practices, conformity of values to non-Lakota or non-traditional values, fluency in Lakota, and participation in traditional ceremonies (Table 1). These variables all seemed like reasonable proxies for acculturation since acculturated Lakota would know less of their own culture, go to fewer ceremonies, and so on. The cultural knowledge score was based on how many complete answers the respondents knew to ‘fill in the blank’ questions regarding Lakota history, historical figures, and important events. Participation in traditional practices was based on how many items they marked in a survey of whether or not they had ever raised a tipi, used traditional medicine, etc. The score for conformity to non-Lakota values was based on how many items they marked with a contrary answer to the emic Lakota value system ("the seven Ws".) Lakota fluency was based on how well they could speak, write, or use the Lakota language. And ceremonial attendance was based on the number of traditional ceremonies they had attended in the past year. There were no significant correlations between either of these TV-related variables and these indexes of acculturation. Table 1. R-Scores (Pearson’s Coefficient of Correlation) between Variables Representing Television and Acculturation R-SCORES Cultural Knowledge Traditional Practices Modern Values Lakota Fluency Ceremonial Attendance Years Owning TV 0.1399 -0.0445 -0.4646 -0.0660 0.1465 Hours of TV/Week -0.3414 -0.2640 -0.2798 -0.3349 0.2048 The strongest correlation was between the number of years the Lakota person owned a television, and the number of non-Lakota (or ‘modern Western’) values they held in their value system. But even that correlation was pretty weak, and nowhere near the r-score of other linear correlations, such as between their age and the number of children they had. How much television Lakota people watched did not seem to have any influence on how much cultural knowledge they knew, how many traditional practices they had participated in, how many non-Lakota values they held, how well they spoke or used the Lakota language, or how many ceremonies they attended. Even though there does not appear to be anything unusual about their television preferences, and in general they are watching the same shows as other non-Lakota people on the reservation, they are not becoming more acculturated as a result of their exposure to television. Although the Lakota people may be losing aspects of their culture, language, and traditions, other causes seem to be at the forefront than television. I also found that people who were very interested in television production as well as consumption saw this as a tool for putting more Lakota-oriented programs on the air. The more they knew about how television worked, the more they were interested in using it as a tool in their own community. And where I was working at the Cultural Center, there was an effort to videotape many community and cultural events. The Center had a massive archive of videotaped material, but unfortunately while they had faithfully recorded all kinds of cultural events, many of them were not quite "broadcast ready". There was more focus on showing these video programmes, especially oral history interviews with elders, on VCRs in the school system, and in integrating them into various kinds of multimedia and hypermedia. While the Cultural Center had begun broadcasting (remotely through a radio modem) a weekly radio show, ‘Wakpa Waste’ (Good Morning CRST), on the radio station to the north, KLND-Standing Rock, there had never been any forays into TV broadcasting. The Cultural Center director had looked into the feasibility of putting up a television signal transmission tower, and had applied for a grant to erect one, but that grant was denied. The local cable system in Eagle Butte unfortunately lacked the technology to carry true "local access" programming; although the Channel 8 of the system carried CRST News and text announcements, there was no open channel available to carry locally produced public access programming. The way the cable system was set up, it was purely a "relay" or feed from news and channels from elsewhere. Also, people were investing heavily in satellite systems, especially the new DBS (direct broadcast satellite) receivers, and would not be able to pick up local access programmes anyway. The main problem hindering the Lakotas’ efforts to preserve their culture through TV and video was lack of access to broadcast distribution technology. They had the interest, the means, and the stock of programming to put on the air. They had the production and editing equipment, although not the studios to do a "live" show. Were they able to have more local access to and control over TV distribution technology, they would have a potent "arsenal" for resisting the drastic acculturation their community is undergoing. TV has the potential to be a tool for great cultural revitalisation, but because the technology and know-how for producing it was located elsewhere, the Lakotas could not benefit from it. Discussion I hypothesised that the effects if TV viewing on levels of indigenous acculturation would be negligible. The data support my hypothesis that TV does not seem to have a major correlation with other indices of acculturation. Previous studies by anthropologists such as Pace and Molohon suggested that TV was a key determinant in the acculturation of indigenous people in Brazil and the U.S. -– this being the theory of cultural imperialism. However, this research suggests that TV’s effect on the decline of indigenous culture is weak and inconclusive. In fact, the qualitative data suggest that the Lakota most familiar with TV are also the most interested in using it as a tool for cultural preservation. Although the CRST Lakota currently lack the means for mass broadcast of cultural programming, there is great interest in it, and new technologies such as the Internet and micro-broadcast may give them the means. There are other examples of this phenomenon worldwide, which suggest that the Lakota experience is not unique. In recent years, Australian Aborigines, Canadian Inuit, and Brazilian Kayapo have each begun ambitious efforts in creating satellite-based television networks that allow them to reach their far-flung populations with programming in their own indigenous language. In Australia, Aboriginal activists have created music television programming which has helped them assert their position in land claims disputes with the Australian government (Michaels 1994), and also to educate the Europeans of Australia about the aboriginal way of life. In Canada, the Inuit have also created satellite TV networks which are indigenous-owned and operated and carry traditional cultural programming (Valaskakis 1992). Like the Aborigines and the Inuit, the Lakota through their HVJ Lakota Cultural Center are beginning to create their own radio and video programming on a smaller scale, but are beginning to examine using the reservation's cable network to carry some of this material. Since my quantitative survey included only 33 respondents, the data are not as robust as would be determined from a larger sample. However, ethnographic interviews focussing on how people approach TV, as well as other qualitative data, support the inferences of the quantitative research. It is not clear that my work with the Lakota is necessarily generalisable to other populations. Practically, it does suggest that anthropologists interested in cultural and linguistic preservation should strive to increase indigenous access to, and control of, TV production technology. ‘Protecting’ indigenous groups from new technologies may cause more harm than good. Future applied anthropologists should work with the ‘natives’ and help teach them how to adopt and adapt this technology for their own purposes. Although this is a matter that I deal with more intensively in my dissertation, it also appears to me to be the case that, contrary to the warnings of Mander, many indigenous cultures are not being culturally assimilated by media technology, but instead are assimilating the technology into their own particular cultural contexts. The technology is part of a process of revitalisation or renewal -- although there is a definite process of change and adaptation underway, this actually represents an 'updating' of old cultural practices for new situations in an attempt to make them viable for the modern situation. Indeed, I think that the Internet, globally, is allowing indigenous people to reassert themselves as a Fourth World "power bloc" on the world stage, as linkages are being formed between Saami, Maya, Lakota, Kayapo, Inuit, and Aborigines. Further research should focus on: why TV seems to have a greater acculturative influence on certain indigenous groups rather than others; whether indigenous people can truly compete equally in the broadcast "marketplace" with Western cultural programming; and whether attempts to quantify the success of TV/video technology in cultural preservation and revival can truly demonstrate that this technology plays a positive role. In conclusion, social scientists may need to take a sidelong look at why precisely they have been such strong critics of introducing new technologies into indigenous societies. There is a better role that they can play –- that of technology ‘broker’. They can cooperate with indigenous groups, serving to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, expertise, and technology between them and the majority society. References Bell, Avril. "'An Endangered Species’: Local Programming in the New Zealand Television Market." Media, Culture & Society 17.1 (1995): 182-202. Gillespie, Marie. Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change. New York: Routledge, 1995. Graburn, Nelson. "Television and the Canadian Inuit". Inuit Etudes 6.2 (1982): 7-24. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Molohon, K.T. "Responses to Television in Two Swampy Cree Communities on the West James Bay." Kroeber Anthropology Society Papers 63/64 (1982): 95-103. Pace, Richard. "First-Time Televiewing in Amazonia: Television Acculturation in Gurupa, Brazil." Ethnology 32.1 (1993): 187-206. Salween, Michael. "Cultural Imperialism: A Media Effects Approach." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8.2 (1991): 29-39. Straubhaar, J. "Beyond Media Imperialism: Asymmetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity". Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8.1 (1991): 39-70. Valaskakis, Gail. "Communication, Culture, and Technology: Satellites and Northern Native Broadcasting in Canada". Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1992. Weiner, J. "Televisualist Anthropology: Representation, Aesthetics, Politics." Current Anthropology 38.3 (1997): 197-236. Woll, Allen. Ethnic and Racial Images in American Film and Television: Historical Essays and Bibliography. New York: Garland Press, 1987. Zimmerman, M. "The Development of a Measure of Enculturation for Native American Youth." American Journal of Community Psychology 24.1 (1996): 295-311. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Steven Mizrach. "Natives on the Electronic Frontier: Television and Cultural Change on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/natives.php>. Chicago style: Steven Mizrach, "Natives on the Electronic Frontier: Television and Cultural Change on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/natives.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Steven Mizrach. (2000) Natives on the electronic frontier: television and cultural change on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/natives.php> ([your date of access]).

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Abstract:

For once I want to be the car crash, Not always just the traffic jam. Hit me hard enough to wake me, And lead me wild to your dark roads. (Snow Patrol: “Headlights on Dark Roads”, Eyes Open, 2006) I didn’t know about the online dating site rsvp.com.au until a woman who I was dating at the time showed me her online profile. Apparently ‘everyone does rsvp’. Well, ‘everyone’ except me. (Before things ended I never did ask her why she listed herself as ‘single’ on her profile…) Forming relationships in our era of post-institutional modes of sociality is problematic. Some probably find such ‘romantically’ orientated ‘meet up’ sites to be a more efficient option for sampling what is available. Perhaps others want some loving on the side. In some ways these sites transform romance into the online equivalent of the logistics dock at your local shopping centre. ‘Just-in-time’ relationships rely less on social support structures of traditional institutions such as the family, workplace, and so on, including ‘love’ itself, and more on a hit and miss style of dating, organised like a series of car crashes and perhaps even commodified through an eBay-style online catalogue (see Crawford 83-88). Instead of image-commodities there are image-people and the spectacle of post-romance romance as a debauched demolition derby. Is romance still possible if it is no longer the naïve and fatalistic realisation of complementary souls? I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film Punch-Drunk Love with the above rsvp.com.au woman. She interpreted it in a completely different manner to me. I shall argue (as I did with her) that the film captures some sense of romance in a post-romance world. The film was billed as a comedy/romance or comedy/drama, but I did not laugh either with or at the film. The story covers the trials of two people ‘falling in love’. Lena Leonard (Emma Watson) orchestrates an encounter with Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) after seeing a picture of him with his seven sisters. The trajectory of the romance is defined less by the meeting of two people, than the violence of contingency and of the world arrayed by the event of love. Contingency is central to complexity theory. Contingency is not pure chance, rather it exists as part of the processual material time of the event that defines events or a series of events as problematic (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 52-53). To problematise events and recognise the contingencies they inculcate is to refuse the tendency to colonise the future through actuarial practices, such as ‘risk management’ and insurance or the probabilistic ‘Perfect Match’ success of internet dating sites (mirroring ‘Dexter’ from the 1980s dating television game show). Therefore, through Punch-Drunk Love I shall problematise the event of love so as to resuscitate the contingencies of post-romance romance. It is not surprising Punch-Drunk Love opens with a car crash for the film takes romance on a veritable post-Crash detour. Crash – novel and film – serves as an exploration of surfaces and desire in a world at the intersection of the accident. Jean Baudrillard, in his infamous essay on Crash (novel), dwells on the repositioning of the accident: [It] is no longer at the margin, it is at the heart. It is no longer the exception to a triumphal rationality, it has become the Rule, it has devoured the Rule. … Everything is reversed. It is the Accident that gives form to life, it is the Accident, the insane, that is the sex of life. (113) After the SUV rolls over in Punch-Drunk Love’s opening scene, a taxi van pauses long enough for an occupant to drop off a harmonium. A harmonium is a cross between an organ and a piano, but much smaller than both. It is a harmony machine. It breathes and wheezes to gather potentiality consonant sound waves of heterogeneous frequencies to produce a unique musicality of multiplicative resonance. No reason is given for the harmonium in the workings of the film’s plot. Another accident without any explanation, like the SUV crash, but this time it is an accidental harmony-machine. The SUV accident is a disorganising eruption of excess force, while the accidental harmony-machine is a synthesising organisation of force. One produces abolition, while the other produces a multiplicative affirmation. These are two tendencies that follow two different relations to the heterogeneous materialism of contingency. Punch-Drunk Love captures the contingency at the heart of post-romance romance. Instead of the layers of expectation habituated into institutional engagements of two subjects meeting, there is the accident of the event of love within which various parties are arrayed with various affects and desires. I shall follow Alain Badiou’s definition of the event of love, but only to the point where I shall shift the perspective from love to romance. Badiou defines love by initially offering a series of negative definitions. Firstly, love is not a fusional concept, the ‘two’ that is ‘one’. That is because, as Badiou writes, “an ecstatic One can only be supposed beyond the Two as a suppression of the multiple” (“What Is Love?” 38). Secondly, nor is love the “prostration of the Same on the alter of the Other.” Badiou argues that it is not an experience of the Other, but an “experience of the world [i.e. multiple], or of the situation, under the post-evental condition that there were Two” (“What Is Love?” 39). Lastly, the rejection of the ‘superstructural’ or illusory conception of love, that is, to the base of desire and sexual jealously (Badiou, “What Is Love?” 39). For Badiou love is the production of truth. The truth is that the Two, and not only the One, are at work in the situation. However, from the perspective of romance, there is no post-evental truth procedure for love as such. In Deleuze’s terminology, from the perspective of post-romance the Two serves an important role as the ‘quasi-cause’ of love (The Logic of Sense 33), or for Badiou it is the “noemenal possibility [virtualite]” (“What Is Love?” 51). The event of the Two, and, therefore, of love, is immanent to itself. However, this does not capture the romantic functioning of love swept up in the quasi-cause of the Two. Romance is the differential repetition of the event of love to-come and thus the repetition of the intrinsic irreducible wonder at the heart of the event. The wonder at love’s heart is the excess of potentiality, the excitement, the multiplicity, the stultifying surprise. To resuscitate the functioning of love is to disagree with Badiou’s axiom that there is an absolute disjunction between the (nominalist) Two. The Two do actually share a common dimension and that is the radical contingency at the heart of love. Love is not as a teleological destiny of the eternal quasi-cause, but the fantastic impossibility of its contingent evental site. From Badiou’s line of argument, romance is precisely the passage of this “aleatory enquiry” (“What is Love?” 45), of “the world from the point of view of the Two, and not an enquiry of each term of the Two about the other” (49). Romance is the insinuation of desire into this dynamic of enquiry. Therefore, the functioning of romance is to produce a virtual architecture of wonder hewn from seeming impossibility of contingency. It is not the contingency in itself that is impossible (the ‘chaosmos’ is a manifold of wonderless-contingency), but that contingency might be repeated as part of a material practice that produces love as an effect of differentiating wonder. Or, again, not that the encounter of love has happened, but that precisely it might happen again and again. Romance is the material and embodied practice of producing wonder. The materiality of romance needs to be properly outlined and to do this I turn to another of Badiou’s texts and the film itself. To explicate the materialism of romance is to begin outlining the problematic of romance where the material force of Lena and Barry’s harmony resonates in the virtuosic co-production of new potentialities. The practice of romance is evidenced in the scene where Lena and Barry are in Hawaii and Lena is speaking to Barry’s sister while Barry is watching her. A sense of wonder is produced not in the other person but of the world as multiplicity produced free from the burden of Barry’s sister, hence altering the material conditions of the differential repetition of contingency. The materialism in effect here is, to borrow from Michel Foucault, an ‘incorporeal materialism’ (169), and pertains to the virtual evental dimension of love. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou sets up dance and theatre as metaphors for thought. “The essence of dance,” writes Badiou, “is virtual, rather than actual movement” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 61), while theatre is an “assemblage” (72) which in part is “the circulation of desire between the sexes” (71). If romance is the deliberate care for the event of love and its (im)possible contingency, then the dance of love requires the theatre of romance. To include music with dance is to malign Badiou’s conception of dance by polluting it with some elements of what he calls ‘theatre’. To return to the Hawaii scene, Barry is arrayed as an example of what Badiou calls the ‘public’ of theatre because he is watching Lena lie to his sister about his whereabouts, and therefore completes the ‘idea’ of theatre-romance as a constituent element (Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics 74). There is an incorporeal (virtual) movement here of pure love in the theatre of romance that repotentialises the conditions of the event of love by producing a repeated and yet different contingency of the world. Wonder triggered by a lie manifest of a truth to-come. According to Badiou, the history of dance is “governed by the perpetual renewal of the relation between vertigo and exactitude. What will remain virtual, what will be actualized, and precisely how is the restraint going to free the infinite?” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 70). Importantly, Badiou suggests that theatrical production “is often the reasoned trial of chances” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 74). Another way to think the materiality of romance is as the event of love, but without Badiou’s necessary declaration of love (“What Is Love?” 45). Even though the ‘truth’ of the Two acts as quasi-cause, love as such remains a pure (‘incorporeal’) Virtuality. As a process, there is no “absolute disappearance or eclipse” that belongs to the love-encounter (“What Is Love?” 45), thus instead producing a rhythmic or, better, melodic heterogeneous tension between the love-dance and romance-theatre. The rhythm-melody of the virtual-actual cascade is distributed around aleatory contingencies as the event of love is differentially repeated and is therefore continually repotentialised and exhausted at the same time. A careful or graceful balance needs to be found between potentiality and exhaustion. The film contains many examples of this (re)potentialising tension, including when Lena achieves the wonder of the ‘encounter’ by orchestrating a meeting. Similarly, Barry feigns a ‘business trip’ to Hawaii to meet up with Lena. This is proceeded by the increased urgency of Barry’s manipulation of the frequent flyer miles reward to meet with up with Lena. The tension is affective – both anxious and exciting – and belongs to the lived duration of contingency. In the same way as an actual material dance floor (or ‘theatre’ here) is repeated across multiple incorporeal dimensions of music’s virtuality through the repotentialisation of the dancer’s body, the multiple dimensions of love are repeated across the virtuality of the lovers’ actions through the repotentialisation of the conditions of the event of love. Punch-Drunk Love frames this problematic of romance by way of a second movement that follows the trajectory of the main character Barry. Barry is a depressive with an affect regulation problem. He flies into a rage whenever a childhood incident is mentioned and becomes anxious or ‘scared’ (as one sister described him) when in proximity to Lena. He tries to escape from the oppressive intimacy of his family. He plays with ‘identity’ in a childlike manner by dressing up as a businessman and wearing the blue suit. His small business is organised around selling plungers used to unblock toilets to produce flow. Indeed, Barry is defined by the blockages and flows of desire. His seven-sister over-Oedipalised familial unit continually operates as an apparatus of capture, a phone-sex pervert scam seeks to overcode desire in libidinal economy that becomes exploited in circuits of axiomatised shame (like an online dating site?), and a consumer rewards program that offers the dream of a frequent-flyer million-miles (line of) flight out of it all. ‘Oedipal’ in the expanded sense Deleuze and Guattari give the term as a “displaced or internalised limit where desire lets itself be caught. The Oedipal triangle is the personal and private territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism’s efforts at social reterritorialisation” (266). Barry says he wants to ‘diversify’ his business, which is not the same thing as ‘expanding’ or developing an already established commercial interest. He does not have a clear idea of what domain or type of business he wants to enter into when diversifying. When he speaks to business contacts or service personnel on the phone he attempts to connect with them on a level of intimacy that is uncomfortably inappropriate for impersonal phone conversations. The inappropriate intimacy comes back to haunt him, of course, when a low-level crook attempts to extort money from him after Barry calls a phone sex line. The romance between Lena and Barry develops through a series of accident-contingencies that to a certain extent ‘unblocks’ Barry and allows him to connect with Lena (who also changes). Apparent contingencies that are not actually contingencies need to be explained as such (‘dropping car off’, ‘beat up bathrooms’, ‘no actual business in Hawaii’, ‘phone sex line’, etc.). Upon their first proper conversation a forklift in Barry’s business crashes into boxes. Barry calls the phone sex line randomly and this leads to the severe car crash towards the end of the film. The interference of Barry’s sisters occurs in an apparently random unexpected manner – either directly or indirectly through the retelling of the ‘gayboy’ story. Lastly, the climatic meeting in Hawaii where the two soon-to-be-lovers are framed by silhouette, their bodies meet not in an embrace but a collision. They emerge as if emitted from the throngs of the passing crowd. Barry has his hand extended as if they were going to shake and there is an audible grunt when their bodies collide in an embrace. To love is to endure the violence of a creative temporality, such as the production of harmony from heterogeneity. As Badiou argues, love cannot be a fusional relation between the two to make the one, nor can it be the relation of the Same to the Other, this is because the differential repetition of the conditions of love through the material practice of romance already effaces such distinctions. This is the crux of the matter: The maximum violence in the plot of Punch-Drunk Love is not born by Lena, even though she ends up in hospital, but by Barry. (Is this merely a masculinist reading of traditional male on male violence? Maybe, and perhaps why rsvp.com.au woman read it different to me.) What I am trying to get at is the positive or creative violence of the two movements within the plot – of the romance and of Barry’s depressive social incompetence – intersect in such a way to force Barry to renew himself as himself. Barry’s explosive fury belongs to the paradox of trying to ‘mind his own business’ while at the same time ‘diversifying’. The moments of violence directed against the world and the ‘glass enclosures’ of his subjectivity are transversal actualisations of the violence of love (on function of ‘glass’ in the film see King). (This raises the question, perhaps irrelevant, regarding the scale of Badiou’s conception of truth-events. After Foucault and Deleuze, why isn’t ‘life’ itself a ‘truth’ event (for Badiou’s position see Briefings on Existence 66-68)? For example, are not the singularities of Barry’s life also the singularities of the event of love? Is the post-evental ‘decision’ supposed to always axiomatically subtract the singular truth-supplement from the stream of singularities of life? Why…?) The violence of love is given literal expression in the film in the ‘pillow talk’ dialogue between Barry and Lena: Barry: I’m sorry, I forgot to shave. Lena: Your face is so adorable. Your skin and your cheek… I want to bite it. I want to bite on your cheek and chew on it, you’re so f*cking cute. Barry: I’m looking at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna f*cking smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze you, you’re so pretty… Lena: I wanna chew your face off and scoop out your eyes. I wanna eat them and chew them and suck on them… Barry: [nodding] Ok…yes, that’s funny… Lena: Yeah… Barry: [still nodding] This’s nice. What dismayed or perhaps intrigued Baudrillard about Crash was its mixing of bodies and technologies in a kind of violent eroticism where “everything becomes a hole to offer itself to the discharge reflex” (112). On the surface this exchange between Barry and Lena is apparently an example of such violent eroticism. For Baudrillard the accident is a product of the violence of technology in the logistics of bodies and signs which intervene in relations in such a way to render perversity impossible (as a threshold structuration of the Symbolic) because ‘everything’ becomes perverse. However, writer and director of Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Anderson, produces a sense of the wondrous (‘Punch-Drunk’) violence that is at the heart of love. This is not because of the actual violence of individual characters; in the film this only serves as a canvas of action to illustrate the intrinsic violence of contingency. Lena and Barry’s ‘pillow talk’ not so much as a dance but a case of the necessary theatre capturing the violence and restraint of love’s virtual dance. ‘Violence’ (in the sense it is used above) also describes the harmonic marshalling of the heterogeneous materiality of sound affected by the harmonium. The ‘violence’ of the harmonium is decisively expressed through the coalescence of the diegetic and nondiegetic soundtracks at the end of the film when Barry plays the harmonium concurrently with Jon Brion’s score for the film. King notes, the “diegetic and nondiegetic music playing together is a moment of cinematic harmony; Barry, Lena, and the harmonium are now in sync” (par. 19). The notes of music connect different diegetic and nondiegetic series which pivot around new possibilities. As Deleuze writes about the notes played at a concert, they are “pure Virtualities that are actualized in the origins [of playing], but also pure Possibilities that are attained in vibrations or flux [of sound]” (The Fold 91). Following Deleuze further (The Fold 146-157), the horizontal melodic movement of romance forms a diagonal or transversal line with the differentially repeated ‘harmonic’ higher unity of love. The unity is literally ‘higher’ to the extent it escapes the diegetic confines of the film itself. For Deleuze “harmonic unity is not that of infinity, but that which allows the existent to be thought of as deriving from infinity” (The Fold 147, ital. added). While Barry is playing the harmonium in this scene Lena announces, “So here we go.” These are the final words of the film. In Badiou’s philosophy this is a declaration of the truth of love. Like the ‘higher’ non/diegetic harmony of the harmonium, the truth of love “composes, compounds itself to infinity. It is thus never presented integrally. All knowledge [of romance] relative to this truth [of the Two, as quasi-cause] thus disposes itself as an anticipation” (“What is Love?” 49). Romance is therefore lived as a vertiginous state of anticipation of love’s harmony. The materiality of romance does not simply consist of two people coming together and falling in love. The ‘fall’ functions as a fatalistic myth used to inscribe bodies within the eschatological libidinal economies of ‘romantic comedies’. To anneal Baudrillard’s lament, perversity obviously still has a positive Symbolic function on the internet, especially online dating sites where anticipation can be modulated through the probabilistic manipulation of signs. In post-romance, the ‘encounter’ of love necessarily remains, but it is the contingency of this encounter that matters. The main characters in Punch-Drunk Love are continually arrayed through the contingencies of love. I have linked this to Badiou’s notion of the event of love, but have focused on what I have called the materiality of romance. The materiality of romance requires more than a ‘fall’ induced by a probabilistic encounter, and yet it is not the declaration of a truth. The post-evental truth procedure of love is impossible in post-romance romance because there is no ‘after’ or ‘supplement’ to an event of love; there is only the continual rhythm of romance and anticipation of the impossible. It is not a coincidence that the Snow Patrol lyrics that serve above as an epigraph resonate with Deleuze’s comment that a change in the situation of Leibnizian monads has occurred “between the former model, the closed chapel with imperceptible openings… [to] the new model invoked by Tony Smith [of] the sealed car speeding down the dark highway” (The Fold 157). Post-Crash post-romance romance unfolds like the driving-monad in an aleatory pursuit of accidents. That is, to care for the event of love is not to announce the truth of the Two, but to pursue the differential repetition of the conditions of love’s (im)possible contingency. This exquisite and beautiful care is required for the contingency of love to be maintained. Hence, the post-romance problematic of romance thus posited as the material practice of repeating the wonder at the heart of love. References Badiou, Alain. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Trans. Norman Madrasz. Albany, New York: State U of New York P, 2006. ———. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2005. ———. “What Is Love?” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 37-53. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Crawford, Kate. Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood. Sydney: Macmillan, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Laster and Charles Stivale. European Perspectives. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Foucault, Michel. “Theatricum Philosophicum.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. F. Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. 165-96. King, Cubie. “Punch Drunk Love: The Budding of an Auteur.” Senses of Cinema 35 (2005). Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fuller, Glen. "Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/03-fuller.php>. APA Style Fuller, G. (Jun. 2007) "Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/03-fuller.php>.

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Abstract:

What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net—well, it’s so new that we don't know what will come next—is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they’re all so specialised! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it’s particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. (Anderson, in Gower, par. 5) The preceding quotation, taken from his 1996 interview with Eric Gower, sees Benedict Anderson reflecting on the formation of imagined, transnational communities on the Internet. Anderson is, of course, famous for his work on how nationalism, as an “imagined community,” gets constructed through the shared consumption of print media (6-7, 26-27); although its readers will never all see each other face to face, people consuming a newspaper or novel in a shared language perceive themselves as members of a collective. In this more recent interview, Anderson recognised the specific groupings of people in online communities: Argentines who find themselves outside of Argentina link up online in an imagined diaspora community. Over the course of the last decade and a half since Anderson spoke about Argentinian migrants and diaspora communities, we have witnessed an exponential growth of new forms of digital communication, including social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), Weblogs, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), and video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube). Alongside these new means of communication, our current epoch of globalisation is also characterised by migration flows across, and between, all continents. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai recognised that “the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation” have altered the ways the imagination operates. Furthermore, these two pillars, human motion and digital mediation, are in constant “flux” (44). The circulation of people and digitally mediatised content proceeds across and beyond boundaries of the nation-state and provides ground for alternative community and identity formations. Appadurai’s intervention has resulted in increasing awareness of local, transnational, and global networking flows of people, ideas, and culturally hybrid artefacts. In this article, we analyse the various innovative tactics taken up by migrant youth to imagine digital diasporas. Inspired by scholars such as Appadurai, Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy, we tease out—from a postcolonial perspective—how digital diasporas have evolved over time from a more traditional understanding as constituted either by a vertical relationship to a distant homeland or a horizontal connection to the scattered transnational community (see Safran, Cohen) to move towards a notion of “hypertextual diaspora.” With hypertextual diaspora, these central axes which constitute the understanding of diaspora are reshuffled in favour of more rhizomatic formations where affiliations, locations, and spaces are constantly destabilised and renegotiated. Needless to say, diasporas are not hom*ogeneous and resist generalisation, but in this article we highlight common ways in which young migrant Internet users renew the practices around diaspora connections. Drawing from research on various migrant populations around the globe, we distinguish three common strategies: (1) the forging of transnational public spheres, based on maintaining virtual social relations by people scattered across the globe; (2) new forms of digital diasporic youth branding; and (3) the cultural production of innovative hypertexts in the context of more rhizomatic digital diaspora formations. Before turning to discuss these three strategies, the potential of a postcolonial framework to recognise multiple intersections of diaspora and digital mediation is elaborated. Hypertext as a Postcolonial Figuration Postcolonial scholars, Appadurai, Gilroy, and Brah among others, have been attentive to diasporic experiences, but they have paid little attention to the specificity of digitally mediated diaspora experiences. As Maria Fernández observes, postcolonial studies have been “notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism” (59). Our exploration of what happens when diasporic youth go online is a first step towards addressing this gap. Conceptually, this is clearly an urgent need since diasporas and the digital inform each other in the most profound and dynamic of ways: “the Internet virtually recreates all those sites which have metaphorically been eroded by living in the diaspora” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 396). Writings on the Internet tend to favour either the “gold-rush” mentality, seeing the Web as a great equaliser and bringer of neoliberal progress for all, or the more pessimistic/technophobic approach, claiming that technologically determined spaces are exclusionary, white by default, masculine-oriented, and heteronormative (Everett 30, Van Doorn and Van Zoonen 261). For example, the recent study by Ito et al. shows that young people are not interested in merely performing a fiction in a parallel online world; rather, the Internet gets embedded in their everyday reality (Ito et al. 19-24). Real-life commercial incentives, power hierarchies, and hegemonies also get extended to the digital realm (Schäfer 167-74). Online interaction remains pre-structured, based on programmers’ decisions and value-laden algorithms: “people do not need a passport to travel in cyberspace but they certainly do need to play by the rules in order to function electronically” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 405). We began our article with a statement by Benedict Anderson, stressing how people in the Argentinian diaspora find their space on the Internet. Online avenues increasingly allow users to traverse and add hyperlinks to their personal websites in the forms of profile pages, the publishing of preferences, and possibilities of participating in and affiliating with interest-based communities. Online journals, social networking sites, streaming audio/video pages, and online forums are all dynamic hypertexts based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding. HTML is the protocol of documents that refer to each other, constituting the backbone of the Web; every text that you find on the Internet is connected to a web of other texts through hyperlinks. These links are in essence at equal distance from each other. As well as being a technological device, hypertext is also a metaphor to think with. Figuratively speaking, hypertext can be understood as a non-hierarchical and a-centred modality. Hypertext incorporates multiplicity; different pathways are possible simultaneously, as it has “multiple entryways and exits” and it “connects any point to any other point” (Landow 58-61). Feminist theorist Donna Haraway recognised the dynamic character of hypertext: “the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice.” However, she adds, “the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid.” We can begin to see the value of approaching the Internet from the perspective of hypertext to make an “inquiry into which connections matter, why, and for whom” (128-30). Postcolonial scholar Jaishree K. Odin theorised how hypertextual webs might benefit subjects “living at the borders.” She describes how subaltern subjects, by weaving their own hypertextual path, can express their multivocality and negotiate cultural differences. She connects the figure of hypertext with that of the postcolonial: The hypertextual and the postcolonial are thus part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating, and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture. Both discourses are characterised by multivocality, multilinearity, openendedness, active encounter, and traversal. (599) These conceptions of cyberspace and its hypertextual foundations coalesce with understandings of “in-between”, “third”, and “diaspora media space” as set out by postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Brah. Bhabha elaborates on diaspora as a space where different experiences can be articulated: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation (4). (Dis-)located between the local and the global, Brah adds: “diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ are contested” (205). As youths who were born in the diaspora have begun to manifest themselves online, digital diasporas have evolved from transnational public spheres to differential hypertexts. First, we describe how transnational public spheres form one dimension of the mediation of diasporic experiences. Subsequently, we focus on diasporic forms of youth branding and hypertext aesthetics to show how digitally mediated practices can go beyond and transgress traditional formations of diasporas as vertically connected to a homeland and horizontally distributed in the creation of transnational public spheres. Digital Diasporas as Diasporic Public Spheres Mass migration and digital mediation have led to a situation where relationships are maintained over large geographical distances, beyond national boundaries. The Internet is used to create transnational imagined audiences formed by dispersed people, which Appadurai describes as “diasporic public spheres”. He observes that, as digital media “increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres” (22). Media and communication researchers have paid a lot of attention to this transnational dimension of the networking of dispersed people (see Brinkerhoff, Alonso and Oiarzabal). We focus here on three examples from three different continents. Most famously, media ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater focused on the Trinidadian diaspora. They describe how “de Rumshop Lime”, a collective online chat room, is used by young people at home and abroad to “lime”, meaning to chat and hang out. Describing the users of the chat, “the webmaster [a Trini living away] proudly proclaimed them to have come from 40 different countries” (though massively dominated by North America) (88). Writing about people in the Greek diaspora, communication researcher Myria Georgiou traced how its mediation evolved from letters, word of mouth, and bulletins to satellite television, telephone, and the Internet (147). From the introduction of the Web, globally dispersed people went online to get in contact with each other. Meanwhile, feminist film scholar Anna Everett draws on the case of Naijanet, the virtual community of “Nigerians Living Abroad”. She shows how Nigerians living in the diaspora from the 1990s onwards connected in global transnational communities, forging “new black public spheres” (35). These studies point at how diasporic people have turned to the Internet to establish and maintain social relations, give and receive support, and share general concerns. Establishing transnational communicative networks allows users to imagine shared audiences of fellow diasporians. Diasporic imagination, however, goes beyond singular notions of this more traditional idea of the transnational public sphere, as it “has nowadays acquired a great figurative flexibility which mostly refers to practices of transgression and hybridisation” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Subjects” 208). Below we recognise another dimension of digital diasporas: the articulation of diasporic attachment for branding oneself. Mocro and Nikkei: Diasporic Attachments as a Way to Brand Oneself In this section, we consider how hybrid cultural practices are carried out over geographical distances. Across spaces on the Web, young migrants express new forms of belonging in their dealing with the oppositional motivations of continuity and change. The generational specificity of this experience can be drawn out on the basis of the distinction between “roots” and “routes” made by Paul Gilroy. In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy writes about black populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The double consciousness of migrant subjects is reflected by affiliating roots and routes as part of a complex cultural identification (19 and 190). As two sides of the same coin, roots refer to the stable and continuing elements of identities, while routes refer to disruption and change. Gilroy criticises those who are “more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation which is more appropriately approached via the hom*onym routes” (19). He stresses the importance of not just focusing on one of either roots or routes but argues for an examination of their interplay. Forming a response to discrimination and exclusion, young migrants in online networks turn to more positive experiences such as identification with one’s heritage inspired by generational specific cultural affiliations. Here, we focus on two examples that cross two continents, showing routed online attachments to “be(com)ing Mocro”, and “be(coming) Nikkei”. Figure 1. “Leipe Mocro Flavour” music video (Ali B) The first example, being and becoming “Mocro”, refers to a local, bi-national consciousness. The term Mocro originated on the streets of the Netherlands during the late 1990s and is now commonly understood as a Dutch honorary nickname for youths with Moroccan roots living in the Netherlands and Belgium. A 2003 song, Leipe mocro flavour (“Crazy Mocro Flavour”) by Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, familiarised a larger group of people with the label (see Figure 1). Ali B’s song is exemplary for a wider community of youngsters who have come to identify themselves as Mocros. One example is the Marokkanen met Brainz – Hyves (Mo), a community page within the Dutch social networking site Hyves. On this page, 2,200 youths who identify as Mocro get together to push against common stereotypes of Moroccan-Dutch boys as troublemakers and thieves and Islamic Moroccan-Dutch girls as veiled carriers of backward traditions (Leurs, forthcoming). Its description reads, “I assume that this Hyves will be the largest [Mocro community]. Because logically Moroccans have brains” (our translation): What can you find here? Discussions about politics, religion, current affairs, history, love and relationships. News about Moroccan/Arabic Parties. And whatever you want to tell others. Use your brains. Second, “Nikkei” directs our attention to Japanese migrants and their descendants. The Discover Nikkei website, set up by the Japanese American National Museum, provides a revealing description of being and becoming Nikkei: As Nikkei communities form in Japan and throughout the world, the process of community formation reveals the ongoing fluidity of Nikkei populations, the evasive nature of Nikkei identity, and the transnational dimensions of their community formations and what it means to be Nikkei. (Japanese American National Museum) This site was set up by the Japanese American National Museum for Nikkei in the global diaspora to connect and share stories. Nikkei youths of course also connect elsewhere. In her ethnographic online study, Shana Aoyama found that the social networking site Hi5 is taken up in Peru by young people of Japanese heritage as an avenue for identity exploration. She found group confirmation based on the performance of Nikkei-ness, as well as expressions of individuality. She writes, “instead of heading in one specific direction, the Internet use of Nikkei creates a starburst shape of identity construction and negotiation” (119). Mocro-ness and Nikkei-ness are common collective identification markers that are not just straightforward nationalisms. They refer back to different homelands, while simultaneously they also clearly mark one’s situation of being routed outside of this homeland. Mocro stems from postcolonial migratory flows from the Global South to the West. Nikkei-ness relates to the interesting case of the Japanese diaspora, which is little accounted for, although there are many Japanese communities present in North and South America from before the Second World War. The context of Peru is revealing, as it was the first South American country to accept Japanese migrants. It now hosts the second largest South American Japanese diaspora after Brazil (Lama), and Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimoro, is also of Japanese origin. We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets blurred as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties, initiates subcultures and offers resistance to mainstream western cultural forms. Digital spaces are used to exert youthful diaspora branding. Networked branding includes expressing cultural identities that are communal and individual but also both local and global, illustrative of how “by virtue of being global the Internet can gift people back their sense of themselves as special and particular” (Miller and Slater 115). In the next section, we set out how youthful diaspora branding is part of a larger, more rhizomatic formation of multivocal hypertext aesthetics. Hypertext Aesthetics In this section, we set out how an in-between, or “liminal”, position, in postcolonial theory terms, can be a source of differential and multivocal cultural production. Appadurai, Bhabha, and Gilroy recognise that liminal positions increasingly leave their mark on the global and local flows of cultural objects, such as food, cinema, music, and fashion. Here, our focus is on how migrant youths turn to hypertextual forms of cultural production for a differential expression of digital diasporas. Hypertexts are textual fields made up of hyperlinks. Odin states that travelling through cyberspace by clicking and forging hypertext links is a form of multivocal digital diaspora aesthetics: The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which I term “hypertext” or “postcolonial,” represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters characterising the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. (Cited in Landow 356-7) On their profile pages, migrant youth digitally author themselves in distinct ways by linking up to various sites. They craft their personal hypertext. These hypertexts display multivocal diaspora aesthetics which are personal and specific; they display personal intersections of affiliations that are not easily generalisable. In several Dutch-language online spaces, subjects from Dutch-Moroccan backgrounds have taken up the label Mocro as an identity marker. Across social networking sites such as Hyves and Facebook, the term gets included in nicknames and community pages. Think of nicknames such as “My own Mocro styly”, “Mocro-licious”, “Mocro-chick”. The term Mocro itself is often already multilayered, as it is often combined with age, gender, sexual preference, religion, sport, music, and generationally specific cultural affiliations. Furthermore, youths connect to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (“Women in Charge”), Dutch nationalism (“I Love Holland”), ethnic affiliations (“The Moroccan Kitchen”) to clothing (the brand H&M), and global junk food (McDonalds). These diverse affiliations—that are advertised online simultaneously—add nuance to the typical, one-dimensional stereotype about migrant youth, integration, and Islam in the context of Europe and Netherlands (Leurs, forthcoming). On the online social networking site Hi5, Nikkei youths in Peru, just like any other teenagers, express their individuality by decorating their personal profile page with texts, audio, photos, and videos. Besides personal information such as age, gender, and school information, Aoyama found that “a starburst” of diverse affiliations is published, including those that signal Japanese-ness such as the Hello Kitty brand, anime videos, Kanji writing, kimonos, and celebrities. Also Nikkei hyperlink to elements that can be identified as “Latino” and “Chino” (Chinese) (104-10). Furthermore, users can show their multiple affiliations by joining different “groups” (after which a hyperlink to the group community appears on the profile page). Aoyama writes “these groups stretch across a large and varied scope of topics, including that of national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identities” (2). These examples illustrate how digital diasporas encompass personalised multivocal hypertexts. With the widely accepted adagio “you are what you link” (Adamic and Adar), hypertextual webs can be understood as productions that reveal how diasporic youths choose to express themselves as individuals through complex sets of non-hom*ogeneous identifications. Migrant youth connects to ethnic origin and global networks in eclectic and creative ways. The concept of “digital diaspora” therefore encapsulates both material and virtual (dis)connections that are identifiable through common traits, strategies, and aesthetics. Yet these hypertextual connections are also highly personalised and unique, offering a testimony to the fluid negotiations and intersections between the local and the global, the rooted and the diasporic. Conclusions In this article, we have argued that migrant youths render digital diasporas more complex by including branding and hypertextual aesthetics in transnational public spheres. Digital diasporas may no longer be understood simply in terms of their vertical relations to a homeland or place of origin or as horizontally connected to a clearly marked transnational community; rather, they must also be seen as engaging in rhizomatic digital practices, which reshuffle traditional understandings of origin and belonging. Contemporary youthful digital diasporas are therefore far more complex in their engagement with digital media than most existing theory allows: connections are hybridised, and affiliations are turned into practices of diasporic branding and becoming. There is a generational specificity to multivocal diaspora aesthetics; this specificity lies in the ways migrant youths show communal recognition and express their individuality through hypertext which combines affiliation to their national/ethnic “roots” with an embrace of other youth subcultures, many of them transnational. 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