Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Le transformation et la commercialisation des hydrocarbures“

Depuis la fin des années 1980, les cidres québécois sont des boissons à valeur ajoutée. Grâce à l’introduction du cidre de glace, un produit à l’origine artisan et haut de gamme, et à la commercialisation de cidres effervescents, le cidre a surtout été positionné à la manière vitivinicole. Les tendances récentes montrent que la transformation et la consommation des cidres au Québec s’inscrivent désormais, à l’instar de la mouvance cidricole nord-américaine, dans un positionnement marchand à la manière brassicole.

L’étude a caractérisé les différents segments de la filière porcine des villes de Pala et Moundou en zone des savanes au Tchad. Des enquêtes transversales et rétrospectives, associées à des observations directes, ont été menées auprès de producteurs, de transformateurs et de consommateurs répartis dans ces deux villes. Au total, 1318 porcs ont été dénombrés dont 354 femelles en âge de reproduction. Le nombre de mises bas moyen par an a été de 1,8 et la taille de la portée de 7,2 porcelets. La productivité numérique annuelle par femelle a été de 11 porcelets. Pour l’ensemble des carcasses transformées annuellement, plus de la moitié était traitée à Moundou, la seconde ville du Tchad. A Pala, les consommateurs ont préféré la viande grillée. A Moundou, les préférences ont été partagées entre la viande en friture, et la viande au four ou grillée. Les résultats ont aussi montré que l’élevage de porcs visait l’amélioration des revenus de la famille grâce à la vente d’animaux, et la production d’animaux autoconsommés. Par la diversité des produits transformés, les activités de transformation et de préparation alimentaire, les acteurs de la filière ont mis à la disposition des consommateurs des aliments carnés à un coût relativement modéré. Les innovations majeures observées dans la filière étaient une porcherie améliorée, un abattoir privé, une société d’élevage et de commercialisation des viandes, et une boucherie-charcuterie pour la transformation et la distribution. La production, la transformation et la commercialisation de la viande porcine ont généré des emplois et amélioré le revenu des différents acteurs de la filière.

Résumé L'arôme de la marchandise La commercialisation de l'olfactif Cet article montre comment la relation qu'entretiennent les Nord-Américains avec leur corps se fait maintenant par l'entremise de divers articles de toilette (savon, déodorant, rince-bouche) qui offrent au consommateur une protection contre le rejet social en éliminant ou en supprimant les odeurs corporelles indésirables. Les auteurs y relatent la petite histoire du marketing de ces produits et présentent un échantillonnage des identités olfactives idéales qui s'offrent aujourd'hui au consommateur avide de parfums ou d'eaux de toilette. Ils font ensuite état de l'utilisation croissante des fragrances pour augmenter l'intérêt du consommateur à l'égard de divers produits manufacturés en raffinant leur « aura ». Cet article se termine par une brève étude de la façon dont un régime de valeurs unique, américanisé, se répand maintenant à la grandeur de la planète, sans toutefois négliger le fait que ce régime est en voie de transformation et qu'il est parfois confronté à la résistance qu'opposent diverses traditions locales.

Le secteur du vivrier et singulièrement la culture du manioc est en plein essor en Côte d’Ivoire, depuis plusieurs années. Ce dynamisme est lié à l’engagement quotidien des acteurs de la filière, mais surtout aux différentes opportunités qu’offre le manioc aux populations urbaines et rurales, à travers sa production, sa transformation et sa commercialisation. L’objectif de cette communication est de montrer l’impact économique et social du manioc dans une agglomération comme Abidjan, capitale économique de la Côte d’Ivoire. Mais surtout attirer l’attention des décideurs publics ivoiriens sur la nécessité de promouvoir cette culture afin de lutter efficacement contre la pauvreté et assurer la sécurité alimentaire du pays.

Alors que les entreprises africaines modernes, publiques ou privées, rencontrent de grandes difficultés, celles relevant du secteur informel résistent à la crise et même se multiplient. Leur succès est, en général, attribué à des facteurs d'ordre culturel. Le présent article a pour objet de montrer que ce succès est aussi dû à la parfaite adaptation de cette offre aux besoins des populations locales, c'est-à-dire à la véritable démarche marketing intuitivement mise en oeuvre par ces entreprises. Divers thèmes sont successivement abordés : le produit, son prix et sa commercialisation. Un exemple vient illustrer ces propos : le secteur informel de l'eau à Abidjan. Enfin la conclusion porte sur l'important problème de la transformation de ces unités en véritables PME.

Cet article caractérise les nœuds de la chaîne de valeur de la « clayuda » et cartographie la participation des femmes et ses implications au sein du foyer dans la municipalité de San Antonio de la Cal (SAC), Oaxaca. Un échantillon de convenance est pris, des entretiens approfondis et des observations participantes sont réalisés. Une analyse est faite selon le genre, la chaîne de valeur, en faveur des pauvres et selon la responsabilisation des femmes. Les résultats indiquent que les femmes participent aux nœuds de transformation et de commercialisation avec une forte prise de décision au sein du ménage, mais avec des difficultés dans les éléments horizontaux.

L'article qui suit porte sur la dynamique des interactions entre rapports de genre et rapports techniques. S'appuyant sur une étude qui a trait à la cuisine au micro-ondes, il met en évidence l'existence de rapports spécifiques entre hommes et femmes, d'ordre à la fois technique et sexué. La transformation du micro-ondes, «produit brun» initialement perçu comme un objet technique de pointe, en «produit blanc» assimilé à un appareil électroménager banal, s'est en effet accompagnée d'une redéfinition sexuée du rôle des acteurs, tant au niveau de la production que de la commercialisation et de l'utilisation. Par là même, ce déplacement a favorisé la reproduction de la hiérarchie de genre dans les rapports à la technologie.

L’objectif de ce papier est d’identifier les déterminants du taux de chômage en Algérie sur la période qui s’étale de 1980 à 2019 en utilisant un modèle à retards échelonnés (ARDL). Les résultats de notre investigation empirique montrent que l’évolution du taux de chômage en Algérie dépend amplement des dépenses publiques et de la croissance économique. Résultat admis, d’un point de vue théorique, la création de richesses par extension de la demande publique et privée s’accompagne de la création d’emploi. Résultats probants dans une économie ou l’essentiel de la valeur ajoutée est généré par la transformation des produits de l’exportation des hydrocarbures en dépenses publiques : dépenses d’équipements et politique sociale expansionniste. Par contre, l’inexistence de la relation entre le PIB et le taux de chômage, s’explique par le fait que le PIB est généré en grande partie par les activités de PTPH et les activités de services (essentiellement le commerce de détail), des activités peu créatrices d’emplois.

Une enquête participative a été réalisée en l’an 2000 dans la région de Kolda, en zone soudanienne au sud du Sénégal, pour analyser les freins au développement de la filière lait et déterminer le rôle et l’apport des femmes dans cette filière. Les femmes sont souvent juridiquement propriétaires des bovins, font la traite et assurent la transformation et la commercialisation du lait. Cependant, elles n’ont aucun contrôle sur les facteurs de production, l’accès à l’instruction et au crédit leur est difficile, et leur niveau de participation aux organisations paysannes est faible. L’amélioration de leur situation passe nécessairement par la mise en place d’un programme d’appui comprenant des actions de formation et d’alphabétisation fonctionnelle, ainsi que des mesures d’accompagnement, comme la mise à disposition de matériels allégeant leurs travaux domestiques et la construction d’infrastructures physiques de base.

David Warren Sabean nous avait déjà donné, avec Property, Production and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870, une étude précise et convaincante sur les mécanismes de la circulation de la propriété, de la distribution comme de l’appropriation des outils de travail et de la fixation du prix des terres. Le cadre en était le petit village de Neckarhausen, dans le Wurtemberg (région à majorité protestante), qui connut au cours de cette période une intensification de l’activité agricole et artisanale, ainsi qu’une transformation profonde des modes de production et de commercialisation. Dans un tel contexte, les relations de parenté et d’alliance, tout en s’adaptant, elles aussi, à ces nouvelles réalités économiques et sociales, constituent, à tous les niveaux, un élément clef de ces mécanismes de circulation. Le nouveau travail que propose aujourd’hui David W. Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870, est plus exclusivement centré sur ces problèmes de parenté et d’alliance, et il ne peut être lu sans tenir compte des résultats présentés dans le premier ouvrage.

Au Sénégal, comme dans beaucoup de pays de l’Afrique de l’Ouest, le poids des importations de lait et de produits laitiers dans la balance commerciale a fini par faire de l’amélioration de la production laitière locale une priorité. Dans cette perspective, un programme d’insémination artificielle a été lancé en 1994 au Sénégal. Cette étude, initiée dans le cadre du Programme concerté de recherche-développement sur l’élevage en Afrique de l’Ouest (Procordel), a eu pour objectif de mieux comprendre la filière dans le bassin arachidier du Sénégal. Les données ont été collectées auprès de 96 éleveurs, 50 commerçants en produits laitiers et 120 consommateurs, repartis dans les régions de Kaolack et de Fatick. Les résultats ont montré que les modes de production animale tendaient vers l’intensification, avec une réduction des effectifs du fait de la restriction de l’espace pastoral. Dans les deux régions de l’étude, la production laitière des métisses a atteint en moyenne 5,6 L/vache/jour. L’alimentation a été identifiée comme la principale contrainte à la production chez les agroéleveurs, surtout en saison sèche. Le système de commercialisation était caractérisé par un circuit très court. Cette commercialisation était assurée par les femmes qui faisaient face à des contraintes importantes liées à l’insuffisance de l’offre de lait et le manque fréquent de moyens de transport, en particulier dans les zones enclavées. En plus de la faiblesse de l’offre, une quasi- absence d’unités de transformation et de valorisation des produits laitiers dans la région a été observée. A cela s’ajoutait le manque de performance des organisations de producteurs intervenant dans la filière. La demande en produits laitiers devenait cependant de plus en plus importante et diversifiée avec le développement des importations. Elle était corrélée aux niveaux de revenus et aux préférences ou habitudes alimentaire des consommateurs

À la fin du XIXe siècle, les guides excluent totalement la gastronomie et la vigne des visites qu’ils proposent aux touristes de passage en Bourgogne. Seuls les sites naturels et les monuments historiques attirent l’attention des voyageurs. La gastronomie et le vin sont alors perçus et vendus comme des produits de luxe aristocratiques et internationaux – c’est-à-dire territorialement désincarnés. Le poids du négoce et sa liberté en termes de vinification (capacité d’assemblages de vins d’origines géographiques différentes) conditionnent amplement cette réalité. À la fin des années 1930, la transformation des normes de production et de commercialisation des vins en faveur d’un système d’appellations d’origine, combinée à la réinvention culturelle des folklores régionaux et aux volontés républicaines de valoriser les petites patries au sein de la grande patrie française, vont bouleverser les représentations régionales. En s’appropriant les concepts folkloristes républicains, les acteurs du marché des vins fins bourguignons vont ainsi réinventer l’univers de sens du produit. Ces initiatives aboutissent à la création d’une nouvelle réalité touristique pour la Bourgogne, désormais visitée pour ses vignes et ses vins, réalité qui se concrétise en 1937 par la création, en Bourgogne, de la toute première route touristique vitivinicole en France.

RésuméLe tissu d'une ville correspond à une transformation de matériaux géologiques bruts en un assemblage complexe de nouveaux minéraux, fabriqués par des humains, et de roches, telles que l'acier, le verre, le plastique, le béton, la brique et la céramique. Cette activité est considérée en termes de « métabolisme urbain », avec des afflux et des flux quotidiens de personnes, de nourriture, d'eau et de déchets. Empruntée aux temps géologiques, une échelle de temps plus longue, de quelques années au millénaire, est adoptée ; elle reste pertinente pour le présent et les générations humaines futures. Dans les systèmes sédimentaires naturels, les flux de matériaux sont gouvernés par des forces naturelles, comme le climat et la gravité, et ils laissent des traces physiques dans les strates des rivières. Dans les villes, les flux de matériaux géologiques nécessaires à les construire et à les reconstruire sont réalisés par les humains et sont largement produits par les énergies fossiles stockées dans les hydrocarbures. Les assemblages de roches anthropogéniques et de minéraux qui en résultent peuvent être pensés comme des systèmes sédimentaires (et/ou des traces fossiles), fossilisables, à l’échelle de la planète. Extrêmement plus diversifiés que les strates géologiques naturelles, ils évoluent aussi bien plus rapidement, notamment en ce qui concerne les déchets. Considérer les villes par le biais d'une telle perspective peut devenir de plus en plus utile, compte tenu de leur nécessaire adaptation aux conditions changeantes de l’époque émergente, l'Anthropocène.

Le poisson est la principale source de protéines animales dans les zones côtières de l’Afrique de l’Ouest, notamment au Bénin, en Côte d’Ivoire et au Sénégal. Le problème de la conservation des produits halieutiques débarqués est un défi sociétal majeur dans ces pays du fait de l’insuffisance d’infrastructures industrielles. La transformation alimentaire traditionnelle contribue à la réduction des pertes post-capture. Divers produits transformés locaux comme l’adjuevan (Côte d’Ivoire), le lanhouin (Bénin) et le guedj (Sénégal), dont les procédés incluent le salage, la fermentation et le séchage, sont proposés aux consommateurs. Ils sont généralement utilisés comme condiments ou parfois comme sources majeures de protéines animales pour enrichir les apports nutritionnels des aliments à base de céréales locales. Les technologies traditionnelles employées pour ces produits sont peu coûteuses, du fait des équipements rudimentaires utilisés. La non-standardisation des techniques de production, notamment la fermentation, généralement spontanée, contribue à une qualité très fluctuante. Cette synthèse présente les différentes approches de fermentation conduisant aux divers produits ciblés, les caractéristiques physico-chimiques et microbiologiques de ces produits, les initiatives d’amélioration essentiellement basées sur le recours à des ferments et les défis sociétaux (renforcement de la recherche, formation des acteurs locaux, appui à la commercialisation) pour la croissance économique de ce secteur.

La transformation de poissons frais en poissons fumés et sa commercialisation constituent pour les femmes une activité de subsistance en Côte d’Ivoire et plus particulièrement dans la capitale économique (Abidjan). Pour améliorer la dynamique de la filière de transformation, des enquêtes socio-sanitaires ont été réalisées sur 4 sites dont 2 sites de transformation et 2 sites de commercialisation durant 1 mois, de mars à avril 2019. Le travail de terrain a consisté à une interview de la population cible sur leurs sites de travail. Elle a reposé sur un questionnaire portant sur le statut social des commerçants, les types de poissons vendus et fumés, la technique de fumage ainsi que les difficultés du métier. Au total, 120 acteurs de la filière ont été interrogés. Les résultats ont montré que ces acteurs principalement des femmes étaient pour la plupart analphabètes. Ces femmes utilisaient la méthode de fumage de type artisanal faisant intervenir comme matériaux, un grillage, posé sur une barrique coupée vers le milieu (fumoir circulaire) et comme combustible le bois d’hévéa combiné parfois à des coques de coco. 13 espèces de poissons à forte valeur économique, parmi lesquelles les trois (3) espèces les plus fumés et commercialisées sur le site Vridi Zimbabwe étaient les poissons Scomber scombrus (28%), Sardinella maderensis (27%), et Euthynnus alletteratus (24%). Par contre sur le site Abobo Doumé, les espèces les plus fumés et commercialisées étaient respectivement Sardinella maderensis (29%), suivi Scomber scombrus (27%), de Ephinephelu aeneus (26%). Ces femmes travaillent dans des conditions pénibles avec des moyens rudimentaires. L’exposition intense et répétée à la fumée et à la chaleur a provoqué chez ces transformatrices,des maux d’yeux, la toux, des céphalées et des démangeaisons cutanées. Bien que cette filière procure des emplois et est une source de revenu pour la population locale, elle présente cependant des risques de santé pour les transformatrices et les consommateurs. English title: Socio-sanitary analysis of fish smoking in the city of Abidjan (Ivory Coast) The processing of fresh fish into smoked fish and its marketing is a subsistence activity for women in Côte d'Ivoire and more particularly in the economic capital (Abidjan). In order to improve the dynamics of the processing sector, socio-sanitary surveys were conducted on 4 sites, including 2 processing sites and 2 marketing sites, during 1 month, from March to April 2019. The fieldwork consisted of an interview of the target population on their work sites. It was based on a questionnaire on the social status of the traders, the types of fish sold and sorted, the smoking technique and the difficulties of the trade. A total of 120 actors in the sector were interviewed. The results showed that these actors, mainly women, were mostly illiterate. These women used the artisanal smoking method, using as materials, a wire mesh, placed on a barrel cut in the middle (circular smoker) and as fuel rubber wood combined sometimes with coconut shells. 13 species of fish with high economic value, among which the three (3) most smoked and commercialized species at the Vridi Zimbabwe site were Scomber scombrus (28%), Sardinella maderensis (27%), and Euthynnus alletteratus (24%). On the other hand, at the Abobo Doumé site, the species most smoked and marketed were Sardinella maderensis (29%), followed by Scomber scombrus (27%), and Ephinephelu aeneus (26%). These women work in harsh conditions with rudimentary means. Intense and repeated exposure to smoke and heat has caused these women to suffer from sore eyes, coughing, headaches and itchy skin. Although this industry provides employment and income for the local population, it poses health risks for processors and consumers.

Le poisson est une source importante de protéines animales, mais son processus de transformation et de commercialisation reste encore artisanal et affecte souvent sa qualité microbiologique, pouvant provoquer des maladies. La présente étude vise à évaluer la qualité hygiénique et microbiologique des poissons fumés traditionnellement destinés à la vente. Cette étude a été réalisée à partir d’une enquête semi-structurée, suivi d´un échantillonnage des poissons fumés les plus prisés et d’une analyse microbiologique. Ainsi, une enquête auprès des fumeuses, vendeuses et consommateurs des poissons fumés a été réalisée pour évaluer l’état d’hygiène des poissons fumés. Après les enquêtes sur les marchés ciblés, des lots de 25 échantillons de poissons fumés ont été effectués pour des analyses microbiologiques. Selon l'enquête réalisée, les poissons fumés les plus prisés sur les marchés ont été Scomber scombrus (Maquereau), Trachurus trachurus (Chinchard), Thunnus spp. (Thon), Cyprinus spp. (Carpes) et Sardinella spp. (Magne). De même, l’enquête réalisée sur les lieux de fumage et les marchés de vente a révélé une méconnaissance et l’inobservance des bonnes pratiques d’hygiène lors du fumage ou de la vente. Les poissons fumés sont prisés par la population pour diverses raisons (goût, coût, odeur, facilité de conservation, accessibilité). Le taux de contamination de Pseudomonas aeruginosa est de 56%, Escherichia coli (68%) ou de Staphylococcus aureus (84%). Par contre, aucune souche de Salmonella n´a été isolé des échantillons de poissons fumés analysés. L’évaluation de la qualité microbiologique des 25 lots de poisson fumé a révélé globalement que les poissons fumés analysés issus des marchés ont été de qualité microbiologique non satisfaisante. L’application rigoureuse des règles d’hygiène durant la chaine de transformation réduiraient de façon significative la flore de contamination des poissons et permettrait d´augmenter leur durée de conservation.

Le régime alimentaire des Inuits du Nunavik s’est modifié considérablement au cours des dernières décennies. Leur alimentation traditionnelle, constituée de viande et de poisson, a évolué vers un régime composé majoritairement de produits alimentaires importés du Sud, bien que l’apport en protéines demeure largement basé sur la consommation de gibier et de poisson. En raison du coût important lié à cette nouvelle forme d’alimentation, la transformation des habitudes alimentaires des Inuits modifie l’état de la sécurité alimentaire au Nunavik. Parce qu’elle permettrait de générer des revenus supplémentaires aux Inuits, la commercialisation de la viande de caribou et de ses sous-produits pourrait contribuer à renforcer l’accessibilité économique des Inuits aux produits du Sud et ainsi participer à l’atteinte d’une sécurité alimentaire durable au Nunavik. La Convention de la Baie-James et du Nord québécois et ses conventions complémentaires, qui établissent le régime de chasse des Inuits, permettent effectivement à ces derniers de pratiquer la chasse commerciale du caribou tout en leur assurant un accès sécurisé à cette ressource faunique dans une perspective de développement durable. Toutefois, certaines dispositions de ces conventions posent problème, principalement en cas de diminution importante des populations de caribous. De plus, des difficultés sont prévisibles quant au respect des règles nationales et internationales liées au commerce des produits alimentaires, notamment en ce qui a trait aux règles d’innocuité et de salubrité.

En Afrique de l’Ouest, les nouveaux modèles de collecte du lait par des unités de transformation sont le reflet des innovations technologiques et institutionnelles promues par les politiques et les projets de développement de la filière. Or, la création des centres de collecte, des minilaiteries ou d’industries laitières bouleverse l’organisation sociale traditionnelle du système laitier et contribue à une déféminisation de la filière. Certaines femmes sont dépossédées de l’activité de collecte - commercialisation et de la gestion des revenus du lait au profit des bergers ou propriétaires hommes. Ce processus est ainsi susceptible de contribuer à la perte de leur autonomie financière. Une étude de cas menée au Mali auprès de trois femmes - transformatrices, exerçant autour de la minilaiterie de Kasséla à 40 kilomètres de Bamako, a permis d’apporter un éclairage à ces évolutions. A partir de questionnaires et d’entretiens semi-structurés, l’étude a permis de mesurer le degré d’adaptation des femmes dans cette dynamique de transformation de la filière laitière locale. Face à l’émergence d’une minilaiterie gérée par les hommes, elles ont initié plusieurs mécanismes de résilience. Cela passait par l’incorporation de la poudre de lait importé, la diversification des produits qu’elles mettaient sur le marché et la fidélisation de la clientèle. Ces stratégies leur ont permis de sécuriser leurs moyens d’existence malgré la prise des parts de marché par les laiteries. Avec des techniques artisanales, chacune d’elles transformaient en moyenne 468 litres de lait par jour, soit le tiers de la production totale de la laiterie de Kasséla, avec un rapport avantage sur coût supérieur à 20 p. 100. Aujourd’hui, les projets de développement laitier tendent de plus en plus à discuter des implications sociales des innovations qu’ils proposent.

Résumé: Cette contribution analyse les dépenses funéraires des femmes Gouro dans le Centre Ouest de la Côte d'Ivoire. Les ressources économiques provenant de la commercialisation de produits vivriers ont permis au leadership féminin associatif d'établir une relation de concurrence entre sexes aboutissant à la transgression de normes sociales et culturelles par des femmes désignées « femmes battantes » dans les espaces masculins. Leur prise de pouvoir se fonde sur les contributions financières aux funérailles qui étaient auparavant uniquement à la charge du groupe agnatique du défunt ou de la défunte. Cette étude examine les différentes formes de légitimation du repositionnement statutaire des femmes lors des cérémonies funéraires en pays Gouro. Pour ce faire, nous avons mobilisé l'ethnographie comme méthode d'observation et comme production de sens de la transformation des rapports de sexes à l'occasion des rites funéraires. ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes the funeral expenditures of Gouro women in west central Côte d'Ivoire. The economic resources derived from the commercialization of food products have created a competitive relationship between the sexes, leading to the transgression of social and cultural norms by women called "fighting women" in male spaces. Their empowerment is based on financial contributions to funerals that were previously the sole responsibility of the agnatic group. This study examines the different forms of legitimization of Gouro women's changing status in funeral ceremonies. To do so, we have relied on ethnography as a method of observation, and as a means of producing meaning about the transformation of gender relations.

Résumé: Cette contribution analyse les dépenses funéraires des femmes Gouro dans le Centre Ouest de la Côte d'Ivoire. Les ressources économiques provenant de la commercialisation de produits vivriers ont permis au leadership féminin associatif d'établir une relation de concurrence entre sexes aboutissant à la transgression de normes sociales et culturelles par des femmes désignées « femmes battantes » dans les espaces masculins. Leur prise de pouvoir se fonde sur les contributions financières aux funérailles qui étaient auparavant uniquement à la charge du groupe agnatique du défunt ou de la défunte. Cette étude examine les différentes formes de légitimation du repositionnement statutaire des femmes lors des cérémonies funéraires en pays Gouro. Pour ce faire, nous avons mobilisé l'ethnographie comme méthode d'observation et comme production de sens de la transformation des rapports de sexes à l'occasion des rites funéraires. ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes the funeral expenditures of Gouro women in west central Côte d'Ivoire. The economic resources derived from the commercialization of food products have created a competitive relationship between the sexes, leading to the transgression of social and cultural norms by women called "fighting women" in male spaces. Their empowerment is based on financial contributions to funerals that were previously the sole responsibility of the agnatic group. This study examines the different forms of legitimization of Gouro women's changing status in funeral ceremonies. To do so, we have relied on ethnography as a method of observation, and as a means of producing meaning about the transformation of gender relations.

En Afrique subsaharienne et particulièrement au Togo, les légumes de cueillette ont été longtemps négligés par la communauté scientifique et les agents de développement, bien qu’ils soient d’importants compléments alimentaires. La présente étude constitue un premier état des lieux sur l’utilisation des légumes de cueillette au Togo pour une valorisation de ces ressources. Pour ce faire, des enquêtes ethnobotaniques ont été menées chez 20 groupes ethniques dans 50 villages distribués sur toute l’étendue du territoire togolais. Les informations obtenues ont été complétées par des observations directes de terrain et l’ensemble des données obtenues ont été catégorisées suivant les ethnies, les zones agro-écologiques, les lieux et périodes de récolte, etc. Au total, 105 espèces dont un ou plusieurs organes sont utilisés comme légume ont été recensées. Elles ont été rangées dans 82 genres et 45 familles dont les Fabaceae, les Malvaceae, les Moraceae, les Asteraceae sont les plus nombreuses. Certaines espèces (Adansonia digitata, Fagara zanthoxyloides, Ocimum gratissimum, Talinum triangulare, Vernonia amygdalina et Vitex doniana) sont largement distribuées et utilisées par divers peuples tandis que d’autres sont spécifiques à des régions agro-écologiques données ou à des groupes ethniques donnés. La plus forte richesse d’espèces légumières a été notée au nord du pays chez les Nawdba et les Kabyè, suivis des Lamba, Moba, Tchokossi et Tamberma. Les organes consommés sont les feuilles (67%), les fruits (18%), les fleurs (6%) et les racines (6%). La période de récolte varie suivant les espèces : 33% des légumes recensés sont récoltés en saison sèche, 14% en saison des pluies et 53% en toute saison. La cueillette, la transformation, le conditionnement et la commercialisation sont des activités dévolues aux femmes. Cette étude a montré que divers organes de nombreuses plantes sont utilisés comme légumes de cueillette par les différentes communautés socio-ethniques du Togo. Elle Constitue une première étape d’un programme de valorisation effective des ressources végétales.

Pour passer en revue la sylviculture destinée à favoriser les produits forestiers non ligneux (Pfnl), il faut avant tout bien comprendre et utiliser des définitions et des termes clairs afin d'éviter toute confusion pour les lecteurs et les utilisateurs quant aux " techniques sylvicoles " décrites, à savoir si elles font actuellement partie de la " foresterie " ou du " secteur agricole ". La production sylvicole des Pfnl entre à la fois dans le domaine de la " foresterie " et de l'" agriculture " du fait que la majorité des espèces de Pfnl sont actuellement prises dans un processus dynamique de domestication qui remplace progressivement les pratiques traditionnelles de récolte et de chasse en forêt, pour aller vers des cultures plus intensives d'exploitation agricole. Les interventions sylvicoles qui favorisent le développement des Pfnl au sein des forêts tropicales sont assujetties aux nouvelles perspectives des utilisateurs, qui peuvent aller de la satisfaction des besoins de subsistance jusqu'à la production de produits de base en vue d'une transformation industrielle et d'une commercialisation internationale. Cet article propose une approche descriptive de la complexité des différentes interventions sylvicoles, qui ont pour objectif de gérer les forêts pour produire non seulement des biens et services ligneux mais aussi des Pfnl. La planification des interventions sylvicoles en faveur des Pfnl, en vue de la gestion des forêts, est encore rarement pratiquée. Elle exige une approche intersectorielle pour intégrer les nombreuses demandes, souvent conflictuelles, des utilisateurs sur le plan tant alimentaire que des besoins en bois d'oeuvre, bois énergétique et Pfnl. En outre, s'agissant des activités récréatives et de loisirs, elle implique de multiples acteurs qui ne sont pas uniquement concernés par l'exploitation du bois. Les organisations internationales et non gouvernementales jouent un rôle essentiel pour sensibiliser et renforcer les capacités techniques et institutionnelles des pays et faire en sorte qu'ils intègrent la sylviculture des Pfnl dans la gestion durable des forêts. (Résumé d'auteur)

Cette étude privilégie un regard nouveau sur les élevages laitiers familiaux en frontière agricole au Brésil : l’organisation technique du travail. Le travail apparaît être un facteur essentiel des conduites d’élevage et une contrainte aux transformations durables des exploitations. Cependant très peu de connaissances ont été produites jusqu’à ce jour. Pour rendre compte de l’organisation du travail sur une année, les temps de travaux ont été quantifiés et les collectifs de travail décrits dans sept fermes « lait-viande », à partir de la méthode « bilan travail ». Les mêmes activités d’astreinte avec le troupeau laitier ont été réalisées dans tous les élevages avec des variances quant aux volumes horaires : 1 h 45 à 6 h 30 par jour et par personne de la cellule de base. Les différences entre les fermes ont été liées à la composition de la cellule de base, à l’effectif de vaches traites et au mode de commercialisation du lait. Sur l’année, 17 à 328 journées ont été dédiées aux activités de saison, dont 17 à 176 jours sur les prairies cultivées. Une partie des activités sur les prairies (sarclage, implantation, clôtures) ont été déléguée à de l’aide familiale ou à des salariés temporaires. Trois stratégies d’éleveurs face au travail ont été identifiées, reposant sur la simplification des conduites ou l’organisation des collectifs de travail. L’étude conclut que le travail est un facteur à prendre en compte pour appuyer la transformation des pratiques des éleveurs et la durabilité des élevages familiaux amazoniens. Les futures actions de recherche-développement en Amazonie permettront de produire des connaissances pour identifier les voies d’amélioration possibles.

La filière bovine est importante en Europe, mais doit faire face à un contexte économique difficile, notamment en raison d’une baisse régulière de la consommation de viande par personne. Les opérateurs de l’élevage à la transformation dégagent peu de marges et les circuits de commercialisation sont de plus en plus complexes et déconnectés de la carcasse, base sur laquelle est encore rémunéré l’éleveur. En parallèle, les comportements des consommateurs évoluent par leurs lieux d’achat, la nature des produits consommés et les attentes qui se sont diversifiées au fil des années, amenant la recherche et le développement à élargir largement son champ d’action. Alors que les actions étaient centrées sur la production et son efficacité dans les années 1970-80, le champ de recherche a progressivement pris en compte les caractéristiques intrinsèques de la viande que sont les qualités sensorielles, sanitaires et nutritionnelles. S’y sont ajoutées plus récemment des qualités associées au produit (appelées qualités extrinsèques) répondant à des attentes sociétales larges, en lien avec les modes de production : bien-être animal, impact environnemental et durabilité des élevages. Cet article a pour objectif de présenter des approches de recherche transversales et intégrées qui sont souvent les seules à apporter les résultats escomptés, ainsi qu’illustré pour la maîtrise d’un risque sanitaire ou la prédiction de la qualité d’une viande en bouche. Certaines lacunes dans les connaissances subsistent encore sur ces aspects, mais de nombreux résultats sont disponibles, bien qu’ils ne soient pas toujours pris en compte dans les pratiques des opérateurs. Des travaux en lien direct avec les attentes des consommateurs sont de plus en plus nécessaires. La recherche doit apporter des outils intégratifs pour prédire de façon objective les qualités intrinsèques de la viande, mais aussi ses qualités extrinsèques. Un fort besoin d’innovation se fait effectivement ressentir pour conquérir de nouveaux marchés et répondre aux attentes sociétales. La combinaison des qualités intrinsèques et extrinsèques afin de mieux satisfaire les consommateurs est un enjeu majeur pour l’avenir de la filière viande bovine et plus largement de la filière viande de ruminants.

This paper considers the influence of academic restructuring associated with neo-liberal postsecondary policies on the culture of law schools and legal scholarship in Canada. It offers empirical data from a case study of the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia. This paper examines the impact of the changing Canadian political economy on the scholarship and culture at the law school and explores the implications for professional autonomy and academic freedom. The findings suggest that, at the time of data collection (2002-2004), the changing political economy had not (yet) affected the law school at the University of British Columbia in the same manner as other jurisdictions and disciplines described in the literature. The data shows that law professors who participated in the study experienced increasing pressures associated with corporatization, commodification and marketization in the larger university, however they consistently described high levels of academic freedom and professional autonomy over their work and scholarship. While there is some evidence of the transformation of academic culture associated with economic restructuring there is also evidence that law professors at this school have maintained control over the direction of their intellectual scholarship.Cet article se penche sur l’influence de la restructuration académique associée aux politiques postsecondaires néo-libérales sur la culture au sein des écoles de droit et sur les études juridiques au Canada. Il présente des données empiriques à partir d’une étude de cas de la Faculté de droit à l’Université de Colombie- Britannique. L’article examine l’impact de l’économie politique canadienne changeante sur l’érudition et la culture à l’école de droit et explore ce que cela implique pour l’autonomie professionnelle et la liberté de l’enseignement. Les résultats suggèrent qu’au moment de la collecte des données (2002-2004), l’économie politique changeante n’avait pas (encore) eut d’effet sur l’école de droit à l’Université de Colombie-Britannique de la même façon que dans d’autres secteurs et d’autres disciplines décrites dans la littérature. Les données indiquent que les professeurs de droit qui ont participé à l’étude sentaient des pressions croissantes associées à la corporatisation, la commercialisation et la marchandisation à l’université dans son ensemble, toutefois ils ont décrit régulièrement de hauts niveaux de liberté de l’enseignement et d’autonomie professionnelle par rapport à leur travail et leurs études. Quoiqu’il existe de l’évidence de la transformation de la culture académique associée à la restructuration économique, il y a aussi de l’évidence que les professeurs de droit de cette école ont maintenu le contrôle de l’orientation de leur travail intellectuel.

Objectif : L’objectif est de ressortir les pratiques et utilisation des sous-produits de niébé dans l’alimentation du bétail. Méthodologie et résultats : Une enquête a été menée dans la Communauté urbaine de Niamey afin d’analyser la commercialisation et les pratiques d’utilisations des sous-produits de niébé dans l’alimentation animale. Au total, 150 éleveurs et 150 revendeurs des sous-produits de niébé ont été enquêtés. Les résultats ont montré que parmi les personnes enquêtées les éleveurs, d’ethnie Djerma âgés de 40 à 59 ans représentent 48,7% alors que chez les revendeurs, ils représentent 88,%. Ces éleveurs pratiquent l’élevage, l’agriculture et le commerce et utilisent aussi bien les fanes que les cosses de niébé pour alimenter leurs animaux. Il a été observé des pertes de feuilles de fanes d’environ 5% au poids d’une botte lors du transport. Conclusion et application : Parmi les sous-produits de niébé, les fanes sont facilement utilisables en saison froide pour 54% des enquêtés. Ces fanes sont distribuées en vrac (76,6%), sans transformation ni association (97,3%) quelconque. Les cosses sont distribuées nature sans modification (90,7%) pendant toute l’année. Une botte de fane d’environ 5 kg est offerte par animal le matin et une tasse des cosses d’environ 1kg/animal sont offertes dans l’après-midi. Cette étude donne l’espoir de continuer à investiguer sur la valorisation des sous-produits de niébé dans l’alimentation du bétail Mots clés : Pratique ; Utilisation ; Sous-produits-Niébé ; Alimentation-bétails ; Niger. Practice and use of legume by-products in cattle feeding to the urban community of Niamey: Case cowpea pods and haulms. ABSTRACT Objective: To highlight the practices and use of cowpea by-products in cattle feeding. Methodology and Results: A survey was conducted in the Urban Community of Niamey to analyze the marketing and use practices of by-products of cowpea in animal feeding. A total of 150 farmers and 150 resellers of cowpea by-products were surveyed. The results showed that among the people surveyed, Djerma breeders aged between 40 and 59 represent 48.7%, while among resellers they represent 88%. These breeders farm and use both the tops the cowpea and pods to feed their animals. Leaf blade losses of approximately 5% by weight of a boot were observed during transport. Conclusion and application of results: Among the cowpea by-products, the tops are easily used in the cold season for 54% of respondents. These tops are distributed in bulk (76.6%), without any transformation or association (97.3%). However, pods are distributed unaltered (90.7%) throughout the year. About 5 kg is offered per animal in the morning and a cup of pods of about 1kg / animal are offered in the afternoon. This study gives hope to continue to investigate the valuation of cowpea by-products in livestock feed. Keywords: Practice; Use; By-products-Cowpea; Feeding-Cattle; Niger.

Description du sujet. La consommation du manioc en République Démocratique du Congo est la plus élevée au monde ; c’est ainsi qu’il est cultivé dans toutes les provinces du pays. En effet, le Haut-Katanga fait partie des provinces de la RDC dont la production du manioc est déficitaire.Objectif. Cet article décrit les différents modes de transformations des maniocs mis en vente et évalue la performance économique de chaque forme commerciale présente sur les marchés de Lubumbashi.Méthodes. Une enquête quantitative et qualitative a été réalisée auprès de 60 commerçantes de manioc (sous formes variées) évoluant sur les différents marchés de la ville de Lubumbashi. La collecte des données a été réalisée entre avril et juin 2022 moyennant un questionnaire d’enquête.Résultats. L’étude révèle que la commercialisation des maniocs sous différentes formes à Lubumbashi est tenue à 100 % par des femmes, en majorité mariées et moins instruites. Par ailleurs, le processus de transformation de ces maniocs est à 90 % manuel et artisanal. Economiquement, le capital investi dans chaque forme commerciale du manioc dégage un bénéfice qui varie en fonction du niveau de transformation. Et après le test de rentabilité, le manioc transformé, appelé Chombo chakabiola (Manioc fermenté et moulu) suivi du manioc frit, génèrent plus de bénéfices comparativement à d’autres formes commerciales.Conclusion. Lubumbashi étant une ville cosmopolite, le pouvoir public a tout intérêt de mettre en place des stratégies pour augmenter la production du manioc et encadrer ce commerce pour bénéficier en retour un avantage en termes des fiscalités. Description of the subject. Cassava is highly consumed in the DRC. It is grown in each province of the country. There is an overproduction in most parts of the country, with the exception of a few provinces. Haut-Katanga is one of the provinces where cassava production is less according to the demand. Therefore, cassava is daily consumed in Lubumbashi in several forms.Objectives. The paper describes various ways in which cassava is processed and evaluates the economic performance of each commercial form present on Lubumbashi’s markets.Methods. To achieve this objective, a survey was carried out among 60 female traders of cassava in various forms, operating in different markets of the Lubumbashi city, to collect data between April and June 2022 using a survey questionnaire.Results. The study reveals that 100 % of cassava sellers in Lubumbashi are ensured by women, most of them are married and less educated. Moreover, the processing of these cassava remains 90 % manual and artisanal. Economically, the capital invested in each commercial form of cassava yields a benefit that varies according to the level of processing. Then, the profitability test, Chombo chakabiola (fermented and ground Cassava), followed by fried cassava, generated higher benefits than other commercial forms.Conclusion. As Lubumbashi is a cosmopolitan city, it's in the public authorities' interest to put in place strategies to increase cassava production and regulate the cassava trade, so as to benefit in return from tax advantages

Sheep and goats (small ruminants) were the first two animals to be domesticated by humans mainly for meat, milk and byproducts. Asia holds the world's largest goat population (52%), followed by Africa (39%), Europe (5%), Americas (4%), and Oceania (<1%). This review article highlighted the current status of small ruminants in Botswana, challenges and efforts being made to increase national flock population. The latest statistics estimate the population of small ruminants in Botswana to be about 2 065 705 (i.e., 1 769 811 goats and 295 894 sheep). Two production systems exist and these are traditional and commercial. The traditional sector held 95% and 88% of goats and sheep, respectively. Generally, productivity as measured by off-take and mortality rates was low in the traditional sector compared to the commercial sector. However, birth rates were high in the traditional sector than in the commercial sector. The major challenges in small ruminants production in decreasing order were production, marketing and infrastructure, technical and financial oriented. Interventions relating to animal health, cultivation of fodder crops and strategic feeding practices, water development, establishment of processing plants countrywide, as well as, intensified farmer education and training could help raise the national flock numbers and improve productivity leading to export of meat to the secured markets in Africa, Middle East and Europe. Les moutons et les chèvres (petits ruminants) ont été les deux premiers animaux à être domestiqués par l'homme principalement pour la viande, le lait et les sous-produits. L'Asie détient la plus grande population caprine au monde (52 %), suivie de l'Afrique (39 %), de l'Europe (5 %), des Amériques (4 %) et de l'Océanie (< 1 %). Cet article de synthèse a mis en évidence la situation actuelle des petits ruminants au Botswana, les défis et les efforts déployés pour augmenter la population du troupeau national. Les dernières statistiques estiment la population de petits ruminants au Botswana à environ 2 065 705 (c'est-à-dire 1769 811 chèvres et 295 894 moutons). Deux systèmes de production existent et ceux-ci sont traditionnels et commerciaux. Le secteur traditionnel détenait respectivement 95 % et 88 % des chèvres et des moutons. En général, la productivité mesurée par les taux de prélèvement et de mortalité était faible dans le secteur traditionnel par rapport au secteur commercial. Cependant, les taux de natalité étaient plus élevés dans le secteur traditionnel que dans le secteur commercial. Les principaux défis de la production de petits ruminants par ordre décroissant étaient la production, la commercialisation et les infrastructures, techniques et financières. Les interventions relatives à la santé animale, à la culture de plantes fourragères et aux pratiques d'alimentation stratégiques, au développement de l'eau, à l'établissement d'usines de transformation dans tout le pays, ainsi qu'à l'intensification de l'éducation et de la formation des agriculteurs pourraient contribuer à augmenter le nombre de troupeaux nationaux et à améliorer la productivité conduisant à l'exportation de viande vers le marchés sécurisés en Afrique, au Moyen-Orient et en Europe.

The novel COVID-19 pandemic came with its swindling effect on all sectors of the economy and the livestock sector is not spared. Its impact on livestock production and value chain in Nigeria as in many other countries of the world cannot be overemphasized and can be best understood from the decline in agricultural and other related economic activities, which were brought to almost a total halt during the pandemic. The lockdown policy instituted by various governments affected local and national food production as farmers could not go to their farmlands. Livestock and related products production and prices were impaired. The lockdown also affected the transportation of livestock, livestock products and livestock feed from farms and industries to the market, and across inter-state borders. COVID-19 threatens many sectors of the economy, resulting in hunger especially in developing countries, reduces animal products' consumption, livestock, livestock farmers and livestock value chain actors suffered a great deal with farmers making less gain resulting from reduced consumption of animal products, and many others lost their jobs from reduced production. There is need for creation of channels for adequate marketing of livestock and products, provision of processing and storage facilities, government, Non Governmental Organizations and individuals should invest in livestock production and research through grants and sponsorships to sustain the industry. Measures should be put in place to facilitate farmer's participation in government regulations on enforcing biosecurity, health standards, disease monitoring, and surveillance practices. La nouvelle pandémie COVID-19 est venue avec son effet d'escroquerie sur tous les secteurs de l'économie et le secteur de bétail n'est pas épargné. Son impact sur la production animale et la chaîne de valeur au Nigéria comme dans de nombreux autres pays du monde ne peut être surestimé et peut être mieux compris à partir du déclin des activités agricoles et autres activités économiques connexes, qui ont été pratiquement arrêtées pendant la pandémie. La politique de verrouillage instituée par divers gouvernements a affecté la production alimentaire locale et nationale car les agriculteurs ne pouvaient pas accéder à leurs terres agricoles. La production et les prix du bétail et des produits connexes ont été dégradés. Le verrouillage a également affecté le transport du bétail, des produits de l'élevage et des aliments du bétail depuis les fermes et les industries jusqu'au marché, et à travers les frontières interétatiques. Le COVID-19 menace de nombreux secteurs de l'économie, entraînant la faim en particulier dans les pays en développement, réduit la consommation de produits animaux, le bétail, les éleveurs et les acteurs de la chaîne de valeur de l'élevage ont beaucoup souffert, les agriculteurs réalisant moins de gains résultant de la réduction de la consommation de produits animaux, et de nombreux autres ont perdu leur emploi en raison de la réduction de la production. Il est nécessaire de créer des canaux pour une commercialisation adéquate du bétail et des produits, la fourniture d'installations de transformation et de stockage, le gouvernement, les organisations non gouvernementales et les particuliers devraient investir dans la production animale et la recherche par le biais de subventions et de parrainages pour soutenir l'industrie. Des mesures devraient être mises en place pour faciliter la participation des agriculteurs à la réglementation gouvernementale sur l'application de la biosécurité, les normes sanitaires, le suivi des maladies et les pratiques de surveillance.

Corona virus disease 2019 (Covid-19) has been major threat for the sustainability of human existence. In understanding the gravity of the situation, every state has undertaken special steps to fight against the pandemic mostly with measures involving social distancing and self-isolation, restriction in travel and trade. This is done in all the states to avoid the spread of the virus. All these strategies to combat against the pandemic have greatly affected an important economic sector such as livestock production. Livestock production is one of the main agricultural sector in endorsing availability and accessibility of food and human development. Livestock plays an important role in the economic system, provides food and feed material, creates employment opportunities to a very large population; meet the animal protein demands of the economy. At present, livestock industry has included game reserves, recreational centers, marketing of livestock, processing of livestock, distribution of animal products, research institutes etc. are all accepted as component of modern animal production. This review intends to document the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on livestock production and food security as it primarily involves the sustainability of human life and the economy. It was observed that the Covid-19 pandemic protocols and provisions interferes with the supply chain of the market with impaired production and distribution. La maladie à virus Corona 2019 (Covid-19) a été une menace majeure pour la durabilité de l'existence humaine. Comprenant la gravité de la situation, chaque État a pris des mesures spéciales pour lutter contre la pandémie, principalement avec des mesures impliquant la distanciation sociale et l'auto-isolement, la restriction des voyages et du commerce. Cela se fait dans tous les états pour éviter la propagation du virus. Toutes ces stratégies de lutte contre la pandémie ont fortement affecté un secteur économique important comme l'élevage. La production animale est l'un des principaux secteurs agricoles en faveur de la disponibilitéet de l'accessibilité de la nourriture et du développement humain. L'élevage joue un rôle important dans le système économique, fournit des denrées alimentaires et des aliments pour animaux, crée des opportunités d'emploi pour une très grande population ; répondre aux besoins en protéines animales de l'économie. À l'heure actuelle, l'industrie de l'élevage comprend des réserves de chasse, des centres de loisirs, la commercialisation du bétail, la transformation du bétail, la distribution de produits d'origine animale, des instituts de recherche, etc. sont tous acceptés comme une composante de la production animale moderne. Cette revue vise à documenter l'impact de la pandémie de Covid-19 sur la production animale et la sécurité alimentaire car elle implique principalement la durabilité de la vie humaine et de l'économie. Il a été observé que les protocoles et dispositions relatifs à la pandémie de Covid-19 interfèrent avec la chaîne d'approvisionnement du marché avec une production et une distribution altérées.

L'Afrique intertropicale sert de cadre à notre réflexion bien que les autres continents tropicaux regorgent d'exemples tout aussi édifiants. Forêt naturelle et forêt plantée ont bien souvent été considérées comme deux pôles opposés de la foresterie, pôles entre lesquels les projets de développement effectuent un mouvement de balancier. Déjà en 1953, Alba1 écrivait : " Il semble inutile d'opposer la sylviculture basée sur la régénération naturelle et celle basée sur la régénération artificielle. D'une part, cela risque d'entraîner des querelles qui, quoique faites sur un ton toujours extrêmement courtois, peuvent blesser inutilement les uns et les autres qui croient le plus souvent, et en toute bonne foi, il faut bien le dire, détenir la vérité en la matière, ce dont on ne saurait les blâmer. " Cette mise en garde n'a pas empêché les deux " clans " d'être plus souvent en opposition qu'en synergie. Dans les années 1960-1970, le balancier était du côté des plantations. C'était l'époque des grands programmes de reboisement, teck en Afrique francophone : gmélina au Mali, pins à Madagascar et okoumé au Gabon dans les années 1950- 1960, puis des grands reboisements périurbains des années 1970 pour le bois énergie. Ces projets étatiques onéreux se sont avérés peu rentables en raison des faibles prix du bois de forêt naturelle pratiqués sur les marchés locaux, ce qui a découragé les bailleurs de fonds. Les plantations sont un investissement à long terme alors que le financement des projets est à court ou moyen terme. Même lorsque les premières rentrées financières des plantations arrivent après six à sept ans (pour le bois de trituration), la faible valeur marchande de ce bois fait que plusieurs rotations sont nécessaires pour rentabiliser l'investissement. Pour les bois d'oeuvre, la révolution est de plusieurs décennies, incompatible avec les cycles des bailleurs de fonds. Ceux-ci considèrent généralement que l'investissement forestier s'arrête quelques années après la plantation et les premiers entretiens. Pourtant, il est nécessaire de financer les travaux ultérieurs pour obtenir in fine des bois de haute qualité à forte valeur marchande car les élagages de pénétration et la première éclaircie fournissent des bois de faibles dimensions qui sont abandonnés sur place en l'absence d'usine de trituration, ce qui est le cas en Afrique. Les éclaircies suivantes produisent des perches et des piquets dont la vente ne finance au mieux que le coût des travaux. Cette absence de retour financier rapide a généré, dans les années 1980, des problèmes au sein des programmes nationaux de reboisement. Par exemple, la Société de développement des forêts ivoiriennes a, faute de pouvoir vendre les premières éclaircies, cessé de planter des tecks pendant plusieurs années, jusqu'au jour où des acheteurs étrangers se sont intéressés à ces produits. À Madagascar, le bailleur de fonds voulait arrêter de financer les plantations de pins initialement destinées à la pâte à papier ; une longue négociation permit de modifier l'objectif du projet et de faire comprendre que les éclaircies et l'élagage étaient indispensables à la production d'un bois de qualité à haute valeur commerciale, et d'obtenir la poursuite du financement des travaux : ce n'est que 26 ans après les premières plantations de pins que les plantations ont commencé à s'autofinancer. Les calculs financiers montrent de très faibles taux de rentabilité interne des plantations ; mais ces calculs ne prennent pas en compte les emplois créés dans les plantations ni le développement des filières de transformation et de commercialisation en aval. (Résumé d'auteur)

Objectifs : L’arbre de Sclerocarya birrea est une espèce forestière très répandue en Afrique et dans certaines zones sahéliennes et soudaniennes du Niger. L’objectif de cette étude est de diagnostiquer l’exploitation actuelle de l’arbre, d’identifier les différentes utilisations faites par les populations autochtones et d’évaluer son apport dans l’alimentation et le revenu des ménages des régions de Maradi et Zinder. Méthodologie et Résultats : La collecte des données est effectuée, auprès de 410 personnes réparties au niveau de 07 communes rurales, à travers des enquêtes socio-économiques, ethnobotaniques et l’analyse des activités économiques autour de cette espèce. Les données d’enquêtes, ayant concerné les personnes vivant dans les villages à proximité de ce produit forestier non ligneux, les tradi-praticiens/forestiers et les entreprises œuvrant dans la production, la commercialisation et la transformation de Sclerocarya birrea, ont montré que ce dernier est une espèce spontanée très présente dans les forêts et brousses mais aussi dans les champs. Il produit des fruits consommés par les populations autochtones. La plante fructifie une fois par an, entre mai et juin. L’usage alimentaire le plus répandu est la consommation de la pulpe des fruits frais à 97- 99%. Les amandes sont soit consommées crues, soit utilisées en cuisine comme condiments à 99% ainsi que les feuilles après cuisson par 91%. Le bois est utilisé essentiellement comme source d’énergie (95%) et dans l’artisanat (90%). L’usage médicinal de l’écorce (90%) et des feuilles (60%) occupe une place importante dans le traitement de plusieurs maladies dont majoritairement les problèmes gastriques. Conclusions et application des résultats : Très peu d’activités économiques se sont développées autour de cet arbre avec une autoconsommation importante des organes de l’arbre surtout en 18113 Arohalassi et al., J. Appl. Biosci. Vol: 174, 2022 Caractérisation socio-économique et identification des usages de Sclerocarya birrea (A. Rich.) Hochst. au Niger période de soudure. La vente des fruits, des noix/graines et des feuilles permet de générer des revenus variables notamment pour les femmes selon la zone. L’absence d’organisation de filière et de marché important, liée à cette espèce constitue une contrainte majeure. Les difficultés liées au concassage de la noix/graine et aux méthodes de conservation des fruits de cet arbre constituent des facteurs limitants pour sa valorisation. Mots clés : PFNL, Caractérisation, usage, Sclerocarya birrea, identification, valorisation, économie, Niger Socio-economic characterization and identification of uses of Sclerocarya birrea (A. Rich.) Höchst. in Niger ABSTRACT Objectives: The Sclerocarya birrea tree is a widely distributed forest species in Africa and in some Sahelian and Sudanese areas of Niger. The objective of this work was to collect the available data on the current exploitation of the tree, to identify the different uses by the indigenous populations and to determine its contribution in the food and the household income from Maradi and Zinder localities. Methodology and results: Data collection was done with 410 people in 07 rural municipalities through socio-economic surveys, ethnobotany and the analysis of economic activities on the tree. The survey data, which concerned people living in villages near this non-wood forest product, traditional practitioners / foresters and companies working in the production, marketing and processing of Sclerocarya birrea, showed that the tree is a spontaneous species very present in forests, bushes, and fields. It produces fruits consumed by surrounding populations. The plant fructify once a year, between May and June mostly. The most common use is consumption of the pulp of fresh fruits for 97- 99%. Almonds are either eaten raw or used in kitchen as condiments for 99% as well as the leaves after cooking by 91%. The wood is used primarily as a source of energy by 95% and in craftsby 90%. The medicinal use of the bark (90%) and leaves (60%) is important in the treatment of several diseases of which mainly concern gastric illness. Conclusions and application of findings: Very few economic activities has been developed with this tree in significant self-consumption of the tree's organs, especially during the lean season. The sale of fruits, nuts / seeds and leaves generates variable income, especially for women depending on the area. The lack of organization of the sector and a large market, linked to this plant is a major constraint. The difficulties linked to the crushing of the nut / seed and the methods of preserving the fruits constitute factors limiting its valuation. Key words: NTFPs, Characterization, use, Sclerocarya birrea, identification, valuation, economy, Niger.

Ce numéro de la revue INRA Productions Animales contient un dossier consacré aux dernières avancées de la recherche sur le foie gras. En effet, la démocratisation de la consommation de ce produit haut de gamme a été permise notamment par les efforts de recherche et développement sur l’élevage des palmipèdes à foie gras et la maîtrise de la qualité du produit. Ce dossier est l’occasion de faire en préalable quelques rappels sur cette belle histoire ! Un peu d’histoire La pratique du gavage est une tradition très ancienne, originaire d’Egypte, dont les traces remontent à 2 500 avant JC. Elle avait pour objectif d’exploiter la capacité de certains oiseaux à constituer des réserves énergétiques importantes en un temps court pour disposer d’un aliment très riche. Si les basreliefs datant de l’ancien empire égyptien attestent de la pratique du gavage, il n’existe pas de preuves que les égyptiens consommaient le foie gras ou s’ils recherchaient la viande et la graisse. Ces preuves sont apparues pour la première fois dans l’empire romain. Les romains gavaient les animaux avec des figues et pour eux le foie constituait le morceau de choix. Le nom de jecur ficatum, signifiant « foie d’un animal gavé aux figues », est ainsi à l’origine du mot foie en français. La production de foie gras s’est développée dans le Sud-ouest et l’Est de la France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles avec le développement de la culture du maïs. Le foie gras est aujourd’hui un met inscrit au patrimoine culturel et gastronomique français (article L. 654-27-1 du code rural défini par la Loi d’Orientation Agricole de 2006). Le contexte de la production de foie gras Avec près de 72% de la production mondiale en 2012, la France détient le quasi monopole de la production de foie gras. Les autres pays ayant des productions significatives sont la Hongrie et la Bulgarie en Europe Centrale, avec environ 10% pour chacun de ces pays, mais aussi l’Espagne avec 3% de la production. L’Amérique du nord et la Chine représentent les deux autres pôles de production les plus significatifs, mais avec moins de 2% du marché. La production française a connu un essor considérable, sans doute le plus important de toutes les productions agricoles, passant de 5 880 tonnes en 1990 à plus de 19 000 tonnes en 2012. A l’origine, le foie gras était principalement obtenu par gavage des oies, longtemps considérées comme l’animal emblématique de cette production. Aujourd’hui, le canard mulard, hybride d’un mâle de Barbarie (Cairina Moschata) et d’une cane commune (Anas Platyrhynchos), est plus prisé (97% des palmipèdes gavés en France). En France, l’oie a vu de ce fait sa part relative pour la production de foie gras diminuer, et c’est la Hongrie qui contrôle 65% de la production mondiale de foie gras d’oie. Toutefois, cette espèce ne représente que 10% de la production mondiale. La France est également le principal pays consommateur de foie gras avec 71% du total, l’Espagne se classant au second rang avec environ 10%. Compte tenu de son image de produit de luxe et d’exception, le foie gras est consommé un peu partout dans le monde lors des repas de haute gastronomie. Les grandes avancées de connaissance et l’évolution des pratiques d’élevage L’amélioration des connaissances sur la biologie et l’élevage des palmipèdes à foie gras a permis de rationnaliser les pratiques d’élevage et d’améliorer la qualité du produit. Plusieurs laboratoires de recherche et structures expérimentales, ayant leurs installations propres et/ou intervenant sur le terrain, ont contribué à l’acquisition de ces connaissances : l’INRA avec l’Unité Expérimentale des Palmipèdes à Foie Gras, l’UMR Tandem, le Laboratoire de Génétique Cellulaire, la Station d’Amélioration Génétique des Animaux et l’UR Avicoles, l’Institut Technique de l’AVIculture, la Ferme de l’Oie, le Centre d’Etudes des Palmipèdes du Sud Ouest, le LEGTA de Périgueux, l’ENSA Toulouse, l’ENITA Bordeaux et l’AGPM/ADAESO qui a mis fin en 2004 à ses activités sur les palmipèdes à foie gras. Aujourd’hui ces structures fédèrent leurs activités dans un but de rationalité et d’efficacité. Les avancées des connaissances et leur transfert dans la pratique, associés à une forte demande du marché, sont à l’origine de l’explosion des volumes de foie gras produits. Ainsi, la maîtrise de la reproduction couplée au développement de l’insémination artificielle de la cane commune et à la sélection génétique (Rouvier 1992, Sellier et al 1995) ont permis la production à grande échelle du canard mulard adapté à la production de foie gras. En effet, ses géniteurs, le mâle de Barbarie et la femelle Pékin, ont fait l’objet de sélections spécifiques basées sur l’aptitude au gavage et la production de foie gras de leurs descendants. La connaissance des besoins nutritionnels des animaux et le développement de stratégies d’alimentation préparant les animaux à la phase de gavage ont également été des critères déterminants pour la rationalisation d’un système d’élevage (Robin et al 2004, Bernadet 2008, Arroyo et al 2012). La filière s’est par ailleurs structurée en une interprofession (le Comité Interprofessionnel du Foie Gras - CIFOG) qui soutient financièrement des travaux de recherches et conduit des actions (organisation de salons du foie gras par exemple) visant à rendre accessibles toutes les avancées de la filière. Ainsi, l’amélioration du matériel d’élevage (gaveuse hydraulique et logement de gavage) a engendré des gains de productivité considérables (Guy et al 1994). Par exemple, en 20 ans, la taille d’une bande de gavage est passée de deux cents à mille individus. Enfin, la construction de salles de gavage, dont l’ambiance est parfaitement contrôlée autorise désormais la pratique du gavage en toute saison. Des études ont aussi permis de déterminer l’influence des conditions d’abattage et de réfrigération sur la qualité des foies gras (Rousselot-Pailley et al 1994). L’ensemble de ces facteurs a contribué à ce que les possibilités de production soient en cohérence avec la demande liée à un engouement grandissant pour le foie gras. Les pratiques d’élevage actuelles Aujourd’hui, le cycle de production d’un palmipède destiné à la production de foie gras comporte deux phases successives : la phase d’élevage, la plus longue dans la vie de l’animal (11 à 12 semaines chez le canard ou 14 semaines chez l’oie) et la phase de gavage, d’une durée très courte (10 à 12 jours chez le canard ou 14 à 18 jours chez l’oie). La phase d’élevage se décompose elle même en trois étapes (Arroyo et al 2012). Pendant la phase de démarrage (de 1 à 4 semaines d’âge) les animaux sont généralement élevés en bâtiment clos chauffé et reçoivent à volonté une alimentation granulée. Pendant la phase de croissance (de 4 à 9 semaines d’âge), les animaux ont accès à un parcours extérieur. Ils sont nourris à volonté avec un aliment composé de céréales à 75% sous forme de granulés. La dernière phase d’élevage est consacrée à la préparation au gavage (d’une durée de 2 à 5 semaines) grâce à la mise en place d’une alimentation par repas (220 à 400 g/j). Son objectif est d’augmenter le volume du jabot et de démarrer le processus de stéatose hépatique. Pendant la phase de gavage les animaux reçoivent deux (pour le canard) à quatre (pour l’oie) repas par jour d’une pâtée composée à 98% de maïs et d’eau. Le maïs est présenté soit sous forme de farine (productions de type standard), soit sous forme d’un mélange de graines entières et de farine, soit encore sous forme de grains modérément cuits (productions traditionnelles ou labellisées). En France, on distingue deux types d’exploitations. Dans les exploitations dites en filière longue et de grande taille (au nombre de 3 000 en France), les éleveurs sont spécialisés dans une des phases de la production : éleveurs de palmipèdes dits « prêt-à-gaver », gaveurs ou éleveurs-gaveurs. Ce type de production standard est sous contrôle d’un groupe ou d’une coopérative qui se charge des opérations ultérieures (abattage, transformation, commercialisation ou diffusion dans des espaces de vente à grande échelle). Il existe également des exploitations en filière courte qui produisent les animaux, transforment les produits et les commercialisent directement à la ferme et qui sont généralement de plus petite taille. Ces exploitations « fermières » ne concernent qu’une petite part de la production (10 à 15%), mais jouent un rôle important pour l’image de production traditionnelle de luxe qu’elles véhiculent auprès des consommateurs. Pourquoi un dossier sur les palmipèdes à foie gras ? Au-delà des synthèses publiées précédemment dans INRA Productions Animales, il nous a semblé intéressant de rassembler et de présenter dans un même dossier les avancées récentes concernant la connaissance de l’animal (articles de Vignal et al sur le séquençage du génome du canard et de Baéza et al sur les mécanismes de la stéatose hépatique), du produit (articles de Théron et al sur le déterminisme de la fonte lipidique du foie gras à la cuisson et de Baéza et al sur la qualité de la viande et des carcasses), ainsi que les pistes de travail pour concevoir des systèmes d’élevage innovants plus durables (article de Arroyo et al). L’actualité et les enjeux pour demain La filière est soumise à de nombreux enjeux sociétaux qui demandent de poursuivre les efforts de recherche. En effet, pour conserver son leadership mondial elle doit rester compétitive et donc maîtriser ses coûts de production tout en répondant à des attentes sociétales et environnementales spécifiques telles que la préservation de la qualité des produits, le respect du bien-être animal ou la gestion économe des ressources. Ainsi, la production de foie gras est parfois décriée eu égard à une possible atteinte au bien-être des palmipèdes pendant l’acte de gavage. De nombreux travaux ont permis de relativiser l’impact du gavage sur des oiseaux qui présentent des prédispositions à ce type de production : la totale réversibilité de l’hypertrophie des cellules hépatiques (Babilé et al 1998) ; l’anatomie et la physiologie des animaux de même que l’absence de mise en évidence d’une élévation du taux de corticostérone (considéré comme marqueur d’un stress aigu) après l’acte de gavage (Guéméné et al 2007) et plus récemment la mise en évidence de l’aptitude à un engraissement spontané du foie (Guy et al 2013). Le conseil de l’Europe a toutefois émis des recommandations concernant le logement des animaux qui préconisent, la disparition des cages individuelles de contention des canards pendant le gavage au profit des cages collectives. Par ailleurs, il recommande la poursuite de nouvelles recherches pour développer des méthodes alternatives au gavage. Parallèlement, à l’instar des autres filières de productions animales, la filière foie gras doit aussi maîtriser ses impacts environnementaux (voir aussi l’article d’Arroyo et al). Les pistes de recherches concernent prioritairement la maîtrise de l’alimentation, la gestion des effluents et des parcours d’élevage. Il reste donc de grands défis à relever pour la filière foie gras afin de continuer à proposer un produitqui conjugue plaisir et durabilité.Bonne lecture à tous !

L’Agriculture Biologique (AB) se présente comme un mode de production agricole spécifique basé sur le respect d’un certain nombre de principes et de pratiques visant à réduire au maximum les impacts négatifs sur l’environnement. Elle est soumise à des interdictions et/ou des obligations de moyens, par exemple l’interdiction des Organismes Génétiquement Modifiés (OGM), des engrais de synthèse et des pesticides ou l’obligation de rotations pluriannuelles. Dans le cas de l’élevage, les critères portent sur l’origine des animaux, les conditions de logement et d’accès aux parcours, l’alimentation ainsi que la prévention et le traitement des maladies. Ainsi, la prévention des maladies est principalement basée sur l’utilisation de techniques d’élevage stimulant les défenses naturelles des animaux et, en cas de problème sanitaire, le recours à l’homéopathie ou à la phytothérapie ; l’emploi d’autres médicaments vétérinaires n’est pas exclu à condition de respecter des conditions réglementaires strictes1. L’AB s’inscrit dans des filières d’approvisionnement et de commercialisation incluant la transformation et la préparation des aliments, la distribution de gros et/ou de détail et le consommateur final. Dans tous les pays, agriculteurs, conditionneurs et importateurs doivent se conformer à des réglementations pour associer à leurs produits un étiquetage attestant de leur nature biologique. Les produits issus de l’AB sont certifiés et des mécanismes d’inspection assurent le respect des règlements. L’AB mondiale est aujourd’hui encore une activité marginale au regard des terres consacrées (moins de 2%), du nombre d’agriculteurs engagés ou des volumes concernés. Il s’agit toutefois d’une activité en forte croissance avec, par exemple, un triplement des surfaces mondiales dédiées entre 1999 et aujourd’hui. Le marché mondial des produits issus de l’AB était estimé à 25 milliards d’euros en 2006, soit deux fois plus qu’en 2000 (données IFOAM). La consommation est très fortement concentrée, à plus de 95% en Amérique du Nord d’une part, et en Europe de l’Ouest où les principaux marchés sont l’Allemagne, l’Italie, la France et le Royaume-Uni, d’autre part. Sur ces deux continents, les importations sont nécessaires pour pallier le déficit de l’offre domestique au regard de la demande intérieure. Ceci est particulièrement vrai en France. Selon le ministère en charge de l’agriculture (2009), «la demande [française] de produits issus de l’AB croît de 10% par an depuis 1999. Or, l’offre [nationale] de produits issus de l’AB est aujourd’hui insuffisante pour satisfaire cette demande croissante. Les surfaces des 11 970 exploitations agricoles françaises en AB ne représentent que 2% de la surface agricole. Par défaut d’organisation entre les producteurs et à cause de l’éparpillement des productions, une part significative des produits bio n’est pas valorisée». Et simultanément, 25% environ de la consommation française de produits bio est satisfaite par des importations. Cette situation a conduit le Ministre en charge de l’agriculture à proposer, dans le cadre du Grenelle de l’environnement, un plan visant le triplement à l’horizon 2012 des surfaces françaises en AB (6% de la surface agricole utile en 2012). Pour atteindre cet objectif, le plan inclut un soutien budgétaire à la structuration de la filière bio (sous la forme d’un fonds de structuration doté de 15 millions d’euros sur cinq ans), la mobilisation de la recherche (notamment sous la forme de crédits «recherche»), un soutien accru aux exploitations converties en AB (via le déplafonnement des 7 600 €/an/unité des aides agro-environnementales pour les exploitations en conversion vers l’AB et une augmentation de l’enveloppe dédiée, ainsi que la reconduction du crédit d’impôt en 2009, celui-ci étant par ailleurs augmenté) et enfin, l’obligation dès 2012 faite à la restauration collective de proposer dans ses menus 20% de produits issus de l’AB. Enfin, dans le cadre du bilan de santé de la Politique Agricole Commune (PAC) du 23 février 2009, une aide spécifique aux exploitations en AB d’un montant d’un peu moins de 40 millions d’euros a été adoptée. Le plan français en faveur de l’AB, popularisé sous le libellé «AB : objectif 2012», vise donc à développer la production domestique de produits issus de l’AB via la fixation d’un objectif quantitatif en termes de surfaces dédiées en jouant simultanément sur la demande (via une contrainte d’incorporation de produits issus de l’AB dans la restauration collective) et l’offre (via, de façon générale, un soutien augmenté aux exploitations en conversion vers l’AB et déjà converties à l’AB). Dans ce contexte, le comité éditorial de la revue Inra Productions Animales et la direction de l’Inra ont souhaité apporter un éclairage scientifique sur les acquis, les verrous et les perspectives en matière d’élevage AB. Ce numéro a été coordonné par J.M. Perez avec l’aide de nombreux relecteurs : que tous soient ici remerciés. Après une présentation du cahier des charges français et de la réglementation communautaire (Leroux et al), le numéro se décline en trois parties : une série d’articles sur différentes filières animales concernées (avicole, porcine, bovine allaitante, ovine allaitante), un focus sur deux approches à l’échelle des systèmes d’élevage (ovin allaitant et bovin laitier), et enfin des articles centrés sur les problèmes les plus aigus rencontrés dans le domaine de la gestion sanitaire et de la maitrise de la reproduction. L’article conclusif de Bellon et al fait le point sur les principales questions de recherche qui demeurent. En aviculture (Guémené et al), à l’exception de l’œuf, la production bio reste marginale, mais les filières sont bien organisées. Cette situation résulte d’une relative synergie avec les filières label rouge, avec lesquelles elles partagent plusieurs caractéristiques (types génétiques, longue durée d’élevage, parcours). Des difficultés multiples subsistent néanmoins. La production bio est pénalisée par le manque de poussins AB, des difficultés de maintien de l’état environnemental et sanitaire des parcours, la rareté de l’aliment bio et la difficulté d’assurer l’équilibre en acides aminés des rations (pas d’acides aminés de synthèse), élément susceptible d’expliquer la surmortalité constatée en pondeuse (liée à des problèmes comportementaux). Par suite, les performances sont inférieures à celles de l’élevage conventionnel (augmentation de la durée d’élevage et de l’indice de conversion) et l’impact environnemental, bien qu’amélioré quand il est rapporté à l’hectare, est moins favorable quand il est mesuré par unité produite, à l’exception notable de l’utilisation de pesticides. Prunier et al aboutissent aux mêmes conclusions dans le cas de la production de porcs AB. Relativement au conventionnel, les contraintes sont fortes sur le plan alimentaire (rareté de l’aliment AB, problème d’équilibre en acides aminés des rations) et de la conduite d’élevage (interdiction ou limitation des pratiques de convenance, âge des animaux au sevrage de 40 jours, difficultés de synchronisation des chaleurs et des mises bas, limitation des traitements vétérinaires). Ces contraintes et la grande diversité des élevages de porcs AB se traduisent par une forte variabilité des performances en termes de survie, reproduction, composition corporelle ou qualité des produits : autant de critères qu’il conviendra de mieux maîtriser à l’avenir pour assurer la pérennité de l’élevage porcin AB. Les performances zootechniques et économiques de l’élevage bovin allaitant bio sont abordées dans l’article de Veysset et al à partir d’un échantillon limité d’exploitations situées en zones défavorisées. Les caractéristiques des unités AB diffèrent peu de celles de leurs voisines en élevage conventionnel ; avec un chargement à l’hectare plus faible mais une plus grande autonomie alimentaire, les résultats techniques des élevages AB sont proches de ceux des élevages conventionnels et ce, en dépit d’une moindre production de viande vive par unité de bétail, en raison d’un cycle de production en moyenne plus long. Sur le plan économique, les charges plus faibles (pas de traitements antiparasitaires, pas de vaccinations systématiques) ne suffisent pas à compenser un moindre produit à l’hectare. Un verrou majeur est le déficit de gestion collective de la filière verticale (absence totale de débouché en AB pour les animaux maigres, en particulier) qui se traduit par un problème aigu de sous-valorisation puisque dans l’échantillon enquêté 71% des animaux sont vendus sans signe de qualité : nul doute qu’il s’agit là d’une priorité d’action. En élevage ovin (Benoit et Laignel), également sur la base d’un échantillon malheureusement restreint, les différences de performances techniques et économiques des élevages conventionnels versus bio varient sensiblement selon la localisation géographique, plaine ou montagne ; il est de ce fait difficile (et dangereux) de dégager des enseignements généraux valables pour l’élevage bio dans son ensemble. L’étude détaillée des adaptations des systèmes d’élevage aux potentialités agronomiques réalisée sur quatre fermes expérimentales montre néanmoins le rôle clé de la variable «autonomie alimentaire». Par suite, la situation économique des élevages ovins bio est plus difficile en zone de montagne où l’autonomie alimentaire, voire fourragère, est moindre (l’achat des aliments non produits sur l’exploitation représente 41% du prix de vente des agneaux dans l’échantillon enquêté). In fine, cela suggère que la variabilité des performances de l’élevage ovin bio, de plaine et de montagne, dépend plus du coût de l’aliment et de la valorisation des agneaux que de la productivité numérique. L’article de Benoit et al porte également sur l’élevage ovin biologique, plus précisément la comparaison de deux systèmes ovins allaitants AB différant par le rythme de reproduction des animaux. Cela montre que les performances de l’élevage ovin AB ne s’améliorent pas quand le rythme de reproduction est accéléré, le faible avantage de productivité numérique ne permettant pas de compenser l’augmentation des consommations d’aliments concentrés et la moindre qualité des agneaux. Au final, cela illustre la plus grande difficulté à piloter le système AB le plus intensif. L’article de Coquil et al relève aussi d’une approche systémique appliquée cette fois à l’élevage bovin laitier. Il porte sur l’analyse d’un dispositif original de polyculture-élevage mis en place à la Station Inra de Mirecourt reposant sur la valorisation maximale des ressources du milieu naturel et accordant une importance première à l’autonomie en paille et à la culture des légumineuses (protéagineux, luzerne). Le cheptel valorise les produits végétaux (prairies et cultures) et assure la fertilisation des parcelles en retour. L’autonomie alimentaire étant privilégiée, les effectifs animaux sont une variable d’ajustement, situation plutôt inhabituelle par comparaison avec des élevages laitiers conventionnels qui cherchent en premier lieu à maintenir les cheptels et les capacités de production animale. Les premiers retours d’expérience suggèrent une révision du dispositif en maximisant les synergies et les complémentarités plutôt que de considérer que l’une des deux activités, la culture ou l’élevage, est au service de l’autre. Cabaret et al proposent un éclairage sur les problèmes sanitaires en élevage biologique. Sur la base, d’une part, d’une analyse des déclaratifs des acteurs de l’élevage, et, d’autre part, d’évaluations aussi objectivées que possible, les chercheurs montrent qu’il n’y aurait pas de différence notable entre l’AB et le conventionnel sur le plan des maladies infectieuses et parasitaires (nature, fréquence). La gestion de la santé des cheptels AB repose davantage sur l’éleveur que sur les prescripteurs externes auxquels il est moins fait appel, et sur une planification sanitaire préalable privilégiant la prévention et une réflexion de plus long terme sur la santé globale du troupeau, l’ensemble des maladies qui peuvent l’affecter, etc. La planification n’est pas uniquement technique. Elle requiert aussi l’adhésion des éleveurs. De fait, l’enquête analysée dans cet article relative aux élevages ovins allaitants met en lumière l’importance de ces aspects individuels et culturels sur la gestion de la santé en élevage biologique. Les alternatives aux traitements anthelminthiques en élevage ruminant AB font l’objet de nombreux travaux (Hoste et al). Différents moyens de lutte contre les parasitoses sont mis en œuvre : gestion du pâturage de façon à limiter le parasitisme helminthique (rotations, mise au repos, assainissement), augmentation de la résistance de l’hôte (génétique, nutrition, vaccination), et traitements alternatifs des animaux infectés (homéopathie, phytothérapie, aromathérapie). Les protocoles d’évaluation objective de ces traitements alternatifs posent des problèmes méthodologiques non totalement résolus à ce jour. Mais traiter autrement, c’est aussi réduire le nombre de traitements anthelminthiques de synthèse via un emploi plus ciblé (saison, catégories d’animaux). Au total, de par la contrainte du cahier des charges à respecter, l’élevage biologique a recours à l’ensemble des moyens de lutte contre les maladies parasitaires. Dans le cadre de cette approche intégrée de la santé animale, l’élevage biologique peut jouer un rôle de démonstrateur pour l’ensemble des systèmes d’élevage concernés par le problème de la résistance et des alternatives aux anthelminthiques utilisés à grande échelle. Même si la réglementation n’impose pas de conduites de reproduction spécifiques en élevage AB, elle contraint fortement les pratiques, notamment l’utilisation des traitements hormonaux. L’impact de ces contraintes est particulièrement fort en élevage de petits ruminants (où le recours à des hormones de synthèse permet l’induction et la synchronisation des chaleurs et des ovulations) et en production porcine (où la synchronisation des chaleurs et des mises bas est très pratiquée). Néanmoins, Pellicer-Rubio et al rappellent que des solutions utilisées en élevage conventionnel peuvent également être mobilisées en élevage biologique, l’effet mâle et les traitements photopériodiques naturels notamment, et ce dans toutes les filières, en particulier celles fortement consommatrices de traitements hormonaux. De façon générale, les marges de progrès sont encore importantes et les solutions seront inévitablement multiformes, combinant diverses techniques selon une approche intégrée. Ici aussi, l’AB veut être valeur d’exemple, en particulier dans la perspective d’une possible interdiction des hormones exogènes en productions animales. L’article de Bellon et al conclut le numéro. Il met l’accent sur quatre thématiques prioritaires de recherche à développer, à savoir 1) la conception de systèmes d’élevage AB, 2) l’évaluation de l’état sanitaire des troupeaux et le développement d’outils thérapeutiques alternatifs, 3) la maîtrise de la qualité des produits et 4) l’étude des interactions entre élevage AB et environnement. A ces quatre orientations, on ajoutera la nécessité de recherches sur l’organisation des filières, la distribution, les politiques publiques, etc. dans la perspective de différenciation et de valorisation par le consommateur des produits issus de l’élevage biologique. Dans le droit fil de ces conclusions, l’Inra a lancé, ce printemps, un nouvel appel à projets de recherche sur l’AB dans le cadre du programme dit AgriBio3 (programme qui prend la suite de deux premiers programmes également ciblés sur l’AB). Les deux grandes thématiques privilégiées sont, d’une part, les performances techniques de l’AB (évaluation, amélioration, conséquences sur les pratiques), et, d’autre part, le développement économique de l’AB (caractérisation de la demande, ajustement entre l’offre et la demande, stratégie des acteurs et politiques publiques). Ce programme, associé à d’autres initiatives nationales (appel à projets d’innovation et de partenariat CASDAR du ministère en charge de l’agriculture) et européennes (programme européen CORE Organic en cours de montage, suite à un premier programme éponyme), devrait permettre, du moins nous l’espérons, de répondre aux défis de l’AB, plus spécifiquement ici à ceux de l’élevage biologique. Un enjeu important est aussi que les innovations qui émergeront de ces futurs programmes, tout comme des travaux pionniers décrits dans ce numéro, constituent une source d’inspiration pour faire évoluer et asseoirla durabilité d’autres formes d’élevage.

Maintenant qu’existe au Québec une production viticole significative et que les lois et règlements québécois autorisent la commercialisation des vins locaux, un des défis majeurs des exploitants agricoles est de faire un vin de qualité comparable aux meilleurs crus. C’est pourquoi l’Association des vignerons du Québec s’est engagée dans une démarche de certification. De cette manière, tous les membres ont accepté, depuis l’automne 2009, de répondre aux exigences d’un cahier des charges ayant pour objectif d’améliorer toutes les opérations de culture et de transformation du raisin. Ce faisant, non seulement l’Association a-t-elle un instrument souple qui lui permettra progressivement de mieux contrôler la qualité de sa production et à terme de l’améliorer encore, mais elle s’assure aussi de la notoriété collective de ses produits. La commercialisation devrait en être améliorée dans un avenir proche. À plus long terme, l’Association voit dans la certification un outil aidant à renforcer la typicité des vins du Québec, permettant ainsi de préparer une possible demande d’appellation au Conseil des appellations réservées et des termes valorisants du Québec.

Les approches réalistes des relations internationales établissent un lien causal entre les hydrocarbures et les conflits frontaliers. S’émancipant de ces lectures déterministes, cet article s’appuie sur du matériau produit au cours d’une enquête ethnographique sur l’insécurité au niveau de la façade maritime du Cameroun entre 2009 et 2022 pour analyser les enjeux de conflit et de coopération autour des ressources dans la baie de Biafra. L’analyse croisée des documents d’archives administratives et sécuritaires, des entretiens et la littérature spécialisée montre, entre 1960 et 2023, deux séquences successives où les ressources pétrolières et gazières maritimes, autrefois objets conflictuels sont devenus des facteurs de coopération transnationale. Cet article analyse également les déterminants de la multiplication des accords sur les zones d’exploitation conjointes dans la baie de Biafra. Il met en perspective, par exemple, le mauvais rôle qui est généralement attribué aux multinationales pétrolières. Les dynamiques décrites dans cet article rendent également compte des manifestations locales d’une dynamique globale de transformation en profondeur des frontières. Elles permettent surtout de sortir des approches militantes et victimaires de l’historiographie africaine des frontières et des lectures déterministes qui font des frontières des obstacles majeurs au développement, à la coopération internationale et à l’intégration régionale.

Description du sujet. Carapa procera DC. est un arbre oléagineux local à fort potentiel socio-économique. Sa promotion peut contribuer à diversifier et augmenter les sources de revenus des communautés locales. Objectifs. Le but de cette étude est d’analyser la chaine de valeur (CV) du savon médical artisanal (SMA) de C. procera et d’évaluer son potentiel pour l’amélioration de l’économie locale. Notre analyse se limite aux dimensions organisationnelle et économique de cette CV, notamment sur la création de valeur ajoutée et sa répartition entre les principaux acteurs qui la composent. Méthode. Un inventaire des produits oléagineux de C. procera dans 29 marchés locaux et des enquêtes auprès de 104 acteurs ont été réalisés principalement dans le Kénédougou et dans d’autres localités de vente des produits au Burkina Faso. Résultats. La CV du SMA implique au moins 283 acteurs réalisant 574 activités relatives à la collecte des graines, leur transformation primaire en huile, la transformation secondaire de l’huile en savon et la commercialisation du savon. Soixante-treize pour cent des acteurs sont membres d’une organisation et 71 % des liens entre les acteurs sont basés sur des contrats. Les marges sont de 0,08 €·kg-1 de graines pour les collecteurs, 1,79 €·l-1 d’huile pour les transformateurs primaires et respectivement 1,42 et 2,22 €·kg-1 de savon pour les transformateurs secondaires et les commerçants. Le revenu et la valeur ajoutée annuels perçus par l’ensemble des acteurs de la CV sont respectivement de 10 573 € et 11 335 €. Le revenu total de la CV est inégalement distribué entre les acteurs, avec 20 % d’entre eux qui en totalisent plus de 70 %. Conclusions. L’essor de la CV du savon de C. procera nécessite une redistribution des revenus pour améliorer les parts des acteurs actuellement défavorisés.

IntroductionTransformation, claims McCracken, is the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom in which consumers, as “co-creators of culture,” are empowered to creatively construct new improved selves (xvi). No longer an “extraordinary event for extraordinary creatures,” transformation today is routine and accessible (McCracken xxi). Contemporary consumer culture encourages individuals to enact these transformations by turning to the market to purchase the resources they require to achieve their desired identity (Ellis et al. 179). This market model of transformation embraces the concept of the marketplace exchange where the one party satisfies the needs of the other in a mutually beneficial exchange relationship. For consumers, the market enables transformation through the purchase and consumption of the desired products and services which support identity building.Critics, however, argue that markets have less positive effects. While it is too simplistic to claim that markets manipulate consumers, marketing exchanges constitute an enduring shaping force on individuals and society (Laczniak and Murphy). Markets shape consumer identities by homogenising them and suppressing their self-expressive capabilities (Kozinets 22). As producers become more powerful, “the market is transformed from a consumer-driven mechanism to a sphere where the producers assimilate consumers’ needs to their own through commercial activity” (Sassatelli 76) (my italics). Marketing and promotion have a persuasive influence and their role in the transformation process is a crucial element in understanding the consumer’s impetus to transform. Consumer identity is of course neither fully a “liberatory act” nor “wholly dictated by the market” (Ellis et al. 182), but there is a relationship between consumer autonomy and the dictates of the market which can be explored through focusing on the transformation of identity through the consumption of cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery is an important site of enquiry as a social practice which “merges the attention given to the body by an individual person with the values and priorities of the consumer society” (Martinez Lirola and Chovanec 490). The body, as Kathy Davis highlighted, has long been seen as a commodity which can be endlessly transformed (Davis, Reshaping the Female Body), and the market for cosmetic surgery is at the forefront of this commodification process (Aizura 305). What is new, however, is the increasing marketisation and commercialisation of the cosmetic surgery industry combined with rising consumerism in which surgical transformation can be purchased simply as a “lifestyle choice alongside fashion, fitness and therapy” (Elliott 7). In the cosmetic surgery market, “patients” are consumers. Rather than choosing cosmetic surgery in order to feel whole or normal, contemporary consumers see surgery as a grooming practice which is part of a body maintenance routine (Jones).As the cosmetic surgery market becomes progressively more competitive, it relies more and more on marketing and promotion for its survival. The intense rivalry between providers drives them, in some cases, to aggressive and often unethical promotional practices. In the related field of pharmaceuticals for example, marketers have been charged with explicitly manipulating social understanding of disease in order to increase profits (Brennan, Eagle, and Rice 17). Unlike TV make-over shows whose primary purpose is to entertain, or celebrity culture which influences indirectly through example, cosmetic surgery promotion sets out with intent to persuade consumers to choose surgical transformation. Cosmetic surgery is presented to consumers “through the neoliberal prism of choice,” encouraging women (mostly) to choose surgery as a self-improvement practice in order to “feel good or pamper herself” (Gurrieri, Brace-Govan, and Previte 534). In a promotional culture which valorises external values and ‘the new’ (Fatah 1), the cost, risk, and pain of surgery are downplayed as an increasing array of self-transformative possibilities are presented as consumption choices. This scenario sees the impetus to transform as driven as much by marketing imperatives as by consumers’ free choice. Indeed in mobilising the rhetoric of choice, the “autonomous” consumer, it seems, plays into the hands of the cosmetic surgery industry.This paper explores consumer transformation through cosmetic surgery by focusing on the tension between the rhetoric of consumer autonomy, freedom, and choice and that of the industry’s marketing and promotional practices in the United Kingdom (UK). I argue that while the consumer is an active player, expressing their freedom and agency in choosing self-transformation through surgery, that autonomy is influenced and constrained by the marketing and promotional practices of the industry. I focus on the inherent paradox in the discourse of transformation in consumer culture which advocates individual consumer freedom and creativity yet limits these freedoms to “acceptable” bodily forms constructed as the norm by promotional images of the cosmetic surgery industry. To paraphrase Susan Bordo, those promotions which espouse consumer choice and self-determination simultaneously eradicate individual difference and circumscribe choice (Unbearable Weight 250). Here I explore how ideals of autonomy, freedom, and choice are utilised to support consumer surgical transformation. Drawing on market research, professional publications, blogs and industry webpages used by UK consumers as they search for information, I demonstrate how marketing and promotion adopt these ideals to provide a visual reference and a language for consumer transformation, which has the effect of shaping and limiting consumer freedom and creativity. Consumer Transformation as Expression of Freedom Contemporary consumers need not be content just to admire the appearance of celebrities and film stars, but can actively engage in the creative construction of new improved selves through surgical transformation (McCracken). This transformation is often expressed by consumers as a liberatory act, as is illustrated by the women surveyed for a UK Department of Health report. As one respondent explains, “I think it’s just the fact that they can . . . and I think over the years, women have a battle with their bodies, as they change, different ages, they do, they struggle with trying to accept it over different years and the fact that you can, it’s like ‘wow, so what, it’s a bit of money, let’s just change ourselves’” (UK Department of Health 32). Even young consumers see cosmetic surgery as an easily available transformative option, such as this 16-year-old female research respondent who describes surgery as “Things that you don’t really need but you just feel you want to have them” (UK Department of Health 33). As these women attest, cosmetic surgery is seen as an increasingly normal and everyday practice. By rhetorically constructing the possibility of transformation as an expression of individual consumer empowerment (“wow, so what, it’s a bit of money, let’s just change ourselves”), they distance the practice “from negative associations with vanity” and oppression (Tait 131). This postmodern consumer is no dupe or victim but a “conscious subject who modifies their body as a project of identity” (Gibson 51) and for whom cosmetic surgery transformation is “the route to happiness and personal empowerment” (Tait 119). Surgical transformation is not a way to strive narcissistically after “an elusive beauty ideal” (Heyes 93). Instead, it is expressed as something they choose to do just for themselves—which Bordo calls the “for me” argument (“Braveheart, Babe, and the Contemporary Body”). In an increasingly visual culture, the accessibility and affordability of cosmetic surgery enable consumers, who are already accustomed to digitally editing their photographical images, to “edit” their physical bodies. This is candidly expressed by Singaporean blogger Ang Chiew Ting who writes, "When I learnt how to use Photoshop, the things that I edited about myself, those have now all been done in real life through plastic surgery. Whatever I wanted to change about my face, I have done." Yet, as I illustrate later, the emphasis on transformation as empowerment through exercising choice (“Whatever I wanted to change about my face, I have done"), plays into the hands of the industry as it “reproduces the logic of surgical industries” (Tait 121). In the politics of consumption, driven by neo-liberal ideologies, consumer choice is sovereign (Sassatelli 184), and it is in the ability to exercise choice, choosing surgery and taking responsibility for that choice, that agency and empowerment are expressed (Leve, Rubin, and Pusic). Blogger Stella Lee explains her decision as “I don't want to say I encourage plastic surgery, this is just my personal choice. It is like saying if I dye my hair purple then I want everyone to have purple hair too. It is simply just for me only. If you wish to do so, go ahead. If you're satisfied with what you have, go ahead.” This consumer is a “discerning and knowledgeable consumer” who researches information about potential surgical procedures and practitioners (Gimlin, “Imagining” 58) and embraces the ideology of self-determinism (Heyes). Consumers considering surgery may visit recommended doctors, research doctors online, and peruse beauty magazines (Leve, Rubin, and Pusic). Tatler magazine, for example, publishes an annual Beauty and Cosmetic Surgery Guide which celebrates “the newest, niftiest ways to reclaim your face and your figure” (Tatler nd). In taking responsibility for themselves, the contemporary consumer reflects the neoliberal agenda “that promotes empowerment through consumer choice and responsibility for self-care” (Leve, Rubin, and Pusic 131). Yet, consumer information on the suitability of surgery and alternative providers is often partial. As one research respondent recalled, “I just typed it into Google and then worked through whatever came up; you're trying to go for the names of companies that are a bit more reputable” (UK Department of Health 28). Internet searches most frequently identify promotional information from the surgery providers themselves including customer stories and testimonials, which seem informative in nature but which have persuasive intent to influence choice. Therefore although seemingly exerting agency by undertaking a process of search in order to make an informed choice, that choice is made within a promotional context that the consumer may not be fully aware exists.Consumer Transformation as Marketing ImperativeThe aim of marketing and promotion, as medicine meets consumerism, is to secure clients for cosmetic surgery (Mirivel). As a consequence, the discourse of cosmetic surgery is highly persuasive and commercially motivated, promoting the need for surgery by mobilising the existing ideological link between identity and physical appearance for commercial ends (Martinez Lirola and Chovanec 489). Promotional strategies include drawing attention to possible deficiencies in appearance, creating opportunities for surgery by problematising normal bodily states, promising intangible benefits, and normalising surgery by positioning it within a consumerist vision of success. Consumer transformation can be driven by perceived lack, inadequacy, or deficit, where a part of the body or face does not stand up to scrutiny when compared to media images. Marketing and promotion draw attention to this lack and imply that any deficiency in appearance can be remedied by consumption practices such as the purchase of hair dye, make-up, or, more drastically, cosmetic surgery. As one research respondent considering surgery explains, “I think people want to look their best and media portrays ‘perfect’ looking people or they portray a certain image and then because it’s what you see all the time, it almost feels like if you don't look like that, then it’s wrong” (UK Department of Health 18). The influence of media on the impetus to transform is explored elsewhere (see Wegenstein), so is not addressed further here. However, the insecurity which results from such media images is further exploited by the marketing and promotional strategies adopted by cosmetic surgery providers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. This does not go unnoticed by consumers: as one research respondent noted, “They pick out your insecurities as a tactic for making you purchase stuff . . . it was supposed to be a free consultation but they definitely do pressure you into having stuff” (UK Department of Health 19). In this deficiency model of transformation, the cosmetic surgery consumer is insecure, lacking in power and volition, and convinced of her inadequacy. This is exacerbated by the promotional images of models featured on cosmetic surgery websites against which consumers evaluate their own looks in a process of social comparisons (Markey and Markey 210). This reflects Bernadette Wegenstein’s notion of the cosmetic gaze, a circular process whereby “the act of looking at our bodies and those of others is informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies of bodily modification” (2). In comparing themselves with the transformed images on surgery websites, consumers are drawn into a process of comparison that tells them how they should look. At the same time as convincing consumers of their inadequacies, providers also tell consumers that they are in control and can act autonomously to transform themselves. For example, a TV advert for The Hospital Group which shows three smiling “transformed” customers claims “If you’re unhappy with your appearance you could change it. If it affects your confidence you could overcome it. If it makes you feel self-conscious, you could take control with cosmetic surgery or dentistry from The Hospital Group” (my italics). In this way marketers marshal the neo-liberal rhetoric of consumer empowerment to encourage the consumption of cosmetic surgery and normalise the practice through the emphasis on choice. Marketing and promotional messages contribute further to these perceived deficits by problematising “normal” bodily conditions resulting from “normal” life experiences such as ageing and pregnancy. Surgeon Ran Rubinstein, for example, draws attention in his blog to thinning lips as an opportunity for lip augmentation: “Lip augmentation might seem like a trend among the younger crowd, but it’s something that people of any age can benefit from getting. As you get older, some areas of your body thin out while some thicken. You might find that you’re gaining weight around your stomach, while your lips and face are getting thin.” Problematising frames a real or perceived physical state as “as a medical problem that requires a medical solution,” subtly implying that cosmetic surgery is “an unavoidable necessity” which is medically justified (Martinez Lirola and Chovanec 503). For example, Jules’s testimonial for facial fillers frames natural, and even positive, features such as smile lines as problematic: “I smile a lot and noticed some smile lines coming through.” Indeed as medicine has historically defined the female body as “deficient and in need of repair,” cosmetic surgery can be legitimately proposed as a solution for “women’s problems with their appearance” (Davis, “A Dubious Equality” 55). Promotional messages emphasise the intrinsic benefits of external transformation, encouraging consumers to opt for surgery in order to align their external appearance with how they feel inside. Much of this discourse calls on consumers’ perceptions of a disparity between how they feel inside and their external body image (Gibson 54). For example, a testimonial from “Carole Anne 69” claims that facial fillers “make me feel like I’m the best version of myself.” (Note that Carole Anne, like all the women providing testimonials for this website, including Carol 50, Jules 38, or Pamela 59, is defined by her looks and by her age.) Although Gimlin’s research suggests that the notions of the “body reflecting the ‘true’ self or re-creating one’s ‘genuine’ appearance” have become less important (“Too Good” 930), they continue to dominate in customer testimonials on surgery websites. For example, Transform breast enlargement client Rebecca exclaims, “I’m still me, but it has completely transformed how I feel about myself on the inside, how I hold and present myself on the outside.” A typical promotional strategy is to emphasise the intangible benefits of cosmetic surgery, such as happiness or confidence. This is encapsulated in a 2011 print advert for Transform Cosmetic Surgery Group which shows a smiling young girl in a bikini holding a placard which reads, “I’ve just had my breasts done, but the biggest change you’ll see is on my face.” In promising happiness or self-confidence, intangible effects which are impossible to measure, marketers avoid the reality of surgery—where a cut is made, what is added or removed, how many stitches are required. Consumers know the world through shopping (Elliott 43), and marketers draw on this behaviour to associate surgery with any other purchase in the life of a successful consumer. Consumers are encouraged to choose from a gallery of looks, to “Browse through our Before and After Gallery for inspiration,” and the purchase is rendered more accessible through the use of discounts, offers, and incentives, which consumers are accustomed to seeing in familiar shopping contexts. Sales intent can be blatant, such as this appeal to disposable income on Realself.com: “Now that your 2015 taxes are (hopefully) filed and behind you, were you fortunate enough to get a refund? If it just so happens that the government will be returning some of your hard-earned cash, what will you be using it for? Electronic gadgets, an island vacation, a shopping spree . . . or plastic surgery?” Providers reduce perceived risk by implying that interventions such as facial fillers are considered normal practice for others, claiming that “Millions of women choose facial fillers, so that they can age exactly the way they want to” and by providing online interactive tools which consumers can use to manipulate facial features to see the potential effect of surgery (This-is-me.com).ConclusionThe aim of this article was to explore the tension between two different views of transformation, one which emphasised consumer autonomy, freedom, and market choice and the other which claims a more restrictive and manipulative influence of the market and its promotional practices. I argue that McCracken’s explanation of transformation as “the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom” (xvi) offers an overly optimistic view of consumer transformation. In the cosmetic surgery market, the expression of consumer autonomy and freedom rests on the discourse of choice. This same discourse is adopted by surgery providers in their persuasive strategies to secure new clients so that the market’s promotional language (e.g. a whole new you) becomes part of the consumer’s understanding of and articulation of cosmetic surgery transformation. I argue that marketing and promotion work to progress consumers along the path to surgery, by giving them reasons to do so. This is achieved by reflecting existing consumer anxieties as deficiencies, by creating new reasons for surgery by problematising normal conditions, by promising intangible benefits, and by normalising the purchase. These promotional practices also regulate and restrict consumers by presenting visual images of transformation which influence how others understand “the perfect you.” The gallery of looks on surgery websites constrains choice by signifying which looks are desirable, and “before and after” rhetoric emphasises the pivotal role of cosmetic surgery in achieving this transformation. ReferencesAizura, Aren. “Where Health and Beauty Meet: Femininity and Racialisation in Thai Cosmetic Surgery Clinics.” Asian Studies Review 33.3 (2009): 303–17.Bordo, Susan. “Braveheart, Babe, and the Contemporary Body.” 3 June 2016 <www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Bordo>.———. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.Brennan, Ross, Lynn Eagle, and David Rice. “Medicalization and Marketing.” Journal of Macromarketing 30.1 (2010): 8–22.Davis, Kathy. “‘A Dubious Equality’: Men, Women and Cosmetic Surgery.” Body & Society 8.1 (2002): 49–65.———. Reshaping the Female Body. New York: Routledge, 1995.Elliott, Anthony. Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming our Lives. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.Ellis, Nick, James Fitchett, Matthew Higgins, Gavin Jack, Ming Lim, Michael Saren, and Mark Tadajewski. Marketing: A Critical Textbook. London: Sage, 2011. Fatah, Fazel. “Should All Advertising of Cosmetic Surgery Be Banned? 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Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2008.Mirivel, Julien. “The Physical Examination in Cosmetic Surgery: Communication Strategies to Promote the Desirability of Surgery.” Health Communication 23.2 (2008): 153–70.Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics. London: Sage, 2007.Tait, Sue. “Television and the Domestication of Cosmetic Surgery.” Feminist Media Studies 7.2 (2007): 119–35. Tatler Magazine. “Beauty & Cosmetic Surgery Guide 2016.” Tatler 2016. 3 June 2016 <http://www.tatler.com/guides/beauty--cosmetic-surgery-guide/2016>.UK Department of Health Research. “Regulation of Cosmetic Interventions: Research among the General Public and Practitioners.” 28 Mar. 2013. Version 3. 22 Apr. 2016 <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/192029/Regulation_of_Cosmetic_Interventions_Research_Report.pdf>.Wegenstein, Bernadette. The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty. 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In post-socialist China, gender norms are marked by rising divorce rates (Kleinman et al.), shifting attitudes towards sex (Farrer; Yan), and a growing commercialisation of sex (Zheng). These phenomena have been understood as indicative of market reforms unhinging past gender norms. In the socialist period, the radical politics of the time moulded women as gender neutral even as state policies emphasised their feminine roles in maintaining marital harmony and stability (Evans). These ideas around domesticity bear strong resemblance to pre-socialist understandings of womanhood and family that anchored Chinese society before the Communists took power in 1949. In this pre-socialist understanding, women were categorised into a hierarchy that defined their rights as wives, mothers, concubines, and servants (Ebrey and Watson; Wolf and Witke). Women who transgressed these categories were regarded as potentially dangerous and powerful enough to break up families and shake the foundations of Chinese society (Ahern). This paper explores the extent to which understandings of Chinese femininity have been reconfigured in the context of China’s post-1979 development, particularly after the 2000s.The popular television dramas Chinese Style Divorce (2004, Divorce), Dwelling Narrowness (2009, Dwelling), and Divorce Lawyers (2014, Lawyers) are set against this socio-cultural backdrop. The production of these shows is regulated by the China State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), who has the power to grant or deny production and distribution permits. Post-production, the dramas are sold to state-owned television stations for distribution (Yu 36). Haiqing Yu summarises succinctly the state of Chinese media: “Chinese state manipulation and interference in the media market has seen the party-state media marketized but not weakened, media control decentralized but not reduced, and the media industry commercialized but not privatized” (42). Shot in one of the biggest cities in Shandong, Qingdao, Divorce focuses on Doctor Song Jianping and his schoolteacher wife Lin Xiaofeng and the conflicts between Song and Lin, who quits her job to become a stay-at-home mom after her husband secures a high-paying job in a foreign-invested hospital. Lin becomes paranoid and volatile, convinced that their divorced neighbour Xiao Li is having an affair with Song. Refusing to explain the situation, Song is willing to give her a divorce but fights over guardianship of their son. In the end, it is unconfirmed whether they reconcile or divorce. Divorce was recognised as TV Drama of the Year in 2004 and the two leads also won awards for their acting. Reruns of the show continue to air. According to Hui Faye Xiao, “It is reported that many college students viewed this TV show as a textbook on married life in urban settings” (118). Dwelling examines the issue of skyrocketing housing prices and the fates of the Guo sisters, Haizao and Haiping, who moved from rural China to the competitive economically advanced metropolis. Haiping is obsessed with buying an apartment while her younger sister becomes the mistress of a corrupt official, Song Siming. Both sisters receive favours from Song, which leads to Haiping’s success in purchasing a home. However, Haizao is less fortunate. She has a miscarriage and her uterus removed while Song dies in a car accident. Online responses from the audience praise Dwelling for its penetrating and realistic insights into the complex web of familial relationships navigated by Chinese people living in a China under transformation (Xiao, “Woju”). Dwelling was taken off the air when a SARFT official criticised the drama for violating state-endorsed “cultural standards” in its explicit discussions of sex and negative portrayals of government officials (Hung, “State” 156). However, the show continued to be streamed online and it has been viewed and downloaded more than 100 million times (Yu 34). In Lawyers, Luo Li and Chi Haidong are two competing divorce lawyers in Beijing who finally tie the knot. Chi was a happily married man before catching his wife with her lover. Newly divorced, he moves into the same apartment building as Luo and the drama focuses on a series of cases they handle, most of which involve extramarital affairs. Lawyers has been viewed more than 1.6 billion times online (v.qq.com) and received the China Huading award for “favourite television drama” in 2015. Although these dramas contain some conventional elements of domestic melodramas, such as extramarital affairs and domestic disputes, they differ from traditional Chinese television dramas because they do not focus on the common trope of fraught mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships.Centred on the politics of family ethics, these hugely popular dramas present the transformation in gender norms as a struggle between post-socialist and pre-socialist understandings of femininity. On the one hand, these dramas celebrate the emergence of a post-socialist femininity that is independent, economically successful, and sexually liberated, epitomising this new understanding of womanhood in the figures of single women and mistresses. On the other hand, the dramas portray these post-socialist women in perpetual conflict with wives and mothers who propound a pre-socialist form of femininity that is sexually conservative and defined by familial relationships, and is economically less viable in the market economy. Focusing on depictions of femininity in these dramas, this paper offers a comparative analysis into the extent to which gender norms have been reconfigured in post-socialist China. It approaches these television dramas as a pedagogical device (Brady) and pays particular attention to the ways through which different categories of women interrogated their rights as single women, mistresses, wives, and mothers. In doing so, it illuminates the politics through which a liberal post-socialist femininity unleashed by market transformation is controlled in order to protect the integrity of the family and maintain social order. Post-Socialist Femininity Unleashed: Single Women and Mistresses A woman’s identity is inextricably linked to her marital status in Chinese society. In pre-socialist China, women relied on men as providers and were expected to focus on contributing to her husband’s family (Ebrey and Watson; Wolf and Witke). This pre-socialist positioning of women within the private realm of the family, though reinterpreted, continued to resonate in the socialist period when women were expected to fulfil marital obligations as wives and participate in the public domain as revolutionaries (Evans). While the pressure to marry has not disappeared in post-socialist China, as the derogatory term “leftover women” (single women over the age of 27) indicates, there are now more choices for single women living in metropolitan cities who are highly educated and financially independent. They can choose to remain single, get married, or become mistresses. Single women can be regarded as a threat to wives because the only thing holding them back from becoming mistresses is their morals. The 28-year-old “leftover woman” Luo Li (Lawyers) is presented as morally superior to single women who choose to become mistresses (Luo Meiyuan and Shi Jiang) and therefore deserving of a happy ending because she breaks up with her boss as soon as she discovers he is married. Luo Li quits to set up a law firm with her friend Tang Meiyu. Both women are beautiful, articulate, intelligent, and sexually liberated, symbolising unleashed post-socialist femininity. Part of the comic relief in Lawyers is the subplot of Luo’s mother trying to introduce her to “eligible” bachelors such as the “PhD man” (Episodes 20–21). Luo is unwilling to lower her standards to escape the stigma of being a “leftover woman” and she is rewarded for adhering to her ideals in the end when she convinces the marriage-phobic Chi Haidong to marry her after she rejects a marriage proposal from her newly divorced ex-lover. While Luo Li refuses to remain a mistress, many women do not subscribe to her worldview. Mistresses have existed throughout Chinese history in the form of concubines and courtesans. A wealthy and powerful man was expected to have concubines, who were usually from lower socio-economic backgrounds (Ebrey and Watson; Liu). Mistresses, now referred to as xiaosan, have become a heated topic in post-socialist China where they are regarded as having the power to destroy families by transgressing moral boundaries. Some argue that the phenomenon is a result of the market-driven economy where women who desire a financially stable life use their sexuality to seek rich married men who lust for younger mistresses as symbols of power. Ruth Y.Y. Hung characterises the xiaosan phenomenon as a “horrendous sex trade [that is] a marker of neoliberal market economies in the new PRC” (“Imagination” 100). A comparison of the three dramas reveals a transformation in the depiction of mistresses over the last decade. While Xiao Li (Divorce) is never “confirmed” as Song Jianping’s mistress, she flirts with him and crosses the boundaries of a professional relationship, posing a threat to the stability of Song’s family life. Although Haizao (Dwelling) is university-educated and has a stable, if low-paying job, she chooses to break up with her earnest caring fiancé to be the mistress of the middle-aged Song Siming who offers her material benefits in the form of “loans” she knows she will never be able to repay, a fancy apartment to live in, and other “gifts” such as dining at expensive restaurants and shopping at big malls. While the fresh-faced Haizao exhibits a physical transformation after becoming Song’s mistress, demonstrated through her newly permed hair coupled with an expensive red coat, mistresses in Lawyers do not change in this way. Dong Dahai’s mistress, the voluptuous Luo Meiyuan is already a successful career woman who flaunts her perfect makeup, long wavy hair, and body-hugging dresses (Episodes 12–26). She exudes sexual confidence but her relationship is not predicated on receiving financial favours in return for sexual ones. She tells Dong’s wife that the only “third person” in a relationship is the “unloved” one (Episode 15). Another mistress who challenges old ideas of the power dynamic of the rich man and financially reliant young woman is the divorced Shi Jiang, Tang Meiyu’s former classmate, who becomes the mistress of Tang’s husband (Cao Qiankun) without any moral qualms, even though she knows that her friend is pregnant with his child. A powerful businesswoman, Shi is the owner of a high-end bar that Cao frequents after losing his job. Unable to tell his wife the truth, he spends most days wandering around and is unable to resist Shi’s advances because she claims to have loved him since their university days and that she understands him. In this relationship, Shi has taken on the role traditionally assigned to men: she is the affluent powerful one who is able to manipulate the downtrodden unemployed man by “lending” him money in his time of need, offering him a job at her bar (Episode 17), and eventually finding him a new job through her connections (Episodes 23–24). When Cao leaves home after Tang finds out about the affair, Shi provides him with a place to stay (Episode 34). Because the viewers are positioned to root for Tang due to her role as the female lead’s best friend, Shi is immediately set up as one of the villains, although she is portrayed in a more sympathetic light after she reveals to Cao that she was forced to give up her son to her ex-husband in America (who cheated on her) in order to finalise her divorce (Episode 29).The portrayal of different mistresses in Lawyers signals a transformation in the representation of gender compared to Divorce and Dwelling, because the women are less naïve than Haizao, financially well-off because of their business acumen, and much more outspoken and determined to fight for what they want. On the surface these women are depicted as more liberated and free from gender hierarchies and sexual oppression. Hung describes xiaosan as “an active if constrained agent . . . whose new mode of life has become revealingly defensible and publicly acceptable in socioeconomic terms that reflect the moral changes that follow economic reforms” (“State” 166). However, the closure of these storylines suggest that although more complex reasons for becoming a mistress have been explored in the new drama, mistresses are still regarded as a threat to social stability and therefore punished, challenging Hung’s argument about the “acceptability” of mistresses in post-socialist China. Post-Socialist Femininity Restrained: Wives and MothersCountering these liberal forms of post-socialist femininity are portrayals of righteous wives and exemplary mothers. These depictions articulate a moral positioning grounded in pre-socialist and socialist understandings of a woman’s place in Chinese society. These portrayals of moral women check the transgressive powers of single women and mistresses with the potential to break families up. More importantly, they remind the audience of desired gender norms that retain the integrity of the family and anchor a society undergoing rapid transformation.The three dramas portray wives who are stridently righteous in their confrontations with women they perceive as a threat to their families. These women find moral justification for the violence they inflict on transgressors from cultural understandings of their rights as wives. Lin Xiaofeng (Divorce) repeatedly challenges Xiao Li to explain the “logic” underlying her actions when she discovers that Xiao accompanied Song Jianping to a wedding (Episode 14). The “logic” Lin refers to is a cultural understanding that it is her right as wife to accompany Song to public events and not Xiao’s. By transgressing this moral boundary, Xiao accords Lin the moral authority to cast doubt on her abilities as a doctor in a public confrontation. It also provides moral justification for Lin to slap Xiao when she suggests that Lin is an embarrassment to her husband, an argument that underscores Lin’s failure and challenges her moral authority as wife. Jiang Miaomiao (Dwelling) draws on similar cultural understandings when she appears at the apartment Haizao shares with Song Siming (Episode 33). Jiang positions herself in the traditional role of a wife as a household manager (Ebrey) whose responsibilities include paying Song’s mistresses. She puts Haizao into a subordinate position by arguing that since Haizao is less than a mistress and slightly better than a prostitute, she is not worth the money Song has given her. When Haizao refuses to return the money a tussle ensues, causing Haizao to have a miscarriage. Likewise, Miao Jinxiu (Lawyers) draws on similar cultural understandings of a wife’s position when she laments popular arguments that depict mistresses such as Luo Meiyuan as usurping the superior position of wives like herself who are less attractive and able to navigate the market economy. Miao describes these arguments as “inverting black into white” (Episode 19). She publicly humiliates Luo by throwing paint on her at a charity event (Episode 17) and covers Luo’s car with posters labelling Luo a “slut,” “prostitute,” and “shameless” (Episode 18). Miao succeeds in “winning” her husband back. The public violence Miao inflicts on Luo and her success in protecting her marriage are struggles to reinforce the boundaries defining the categories of wife and mistress as these limits become increasingly challenged in China. In contrast to the violent strategies that Lin, Jiang, and Miao adopt, Tang Meiyu resists Shi Jiang’s destructive powers by reminding her errant husband of the emotional warmth of their family. She asks him, “Do you still remember telling me what the nicest sound is at home?” For Cao, the best sounds are Tang’s laughter, their baby’s cries, the sound of the washing machine, and the flushing of their leaky toilet (Episode 43). The couple reconciles and even wins a lottery that cements their “happy ending.” By highlighting the warmth of their family, Tang reminds Cao of her rightful place as wife, restrains Shi from breaking up the couple, and protects the integrity of the family. It is by drawing on deeply entrenched cultural understandings of the rights of wives that these women find the moral authority to challenge, restrain, and control the transgressive powers of mistresses and single women. The dramas’ portrayals of mothers further reinforce the sense that there is a need to restrain liberal forms of post-socialist femininity embodied by errant daughters who transgress the moral boundaries of the family. Lin Xiaofeng’s mother (Divorce) assumes the role of the forgiving wife and mother. She not only forgives Lin’s father for having an affair but raises Lin, her husband’s love child, as her own (Episode 23). On her deathbed, she articulates the values underlying her acceptance of this transgression, namely that one needs to be “a little kinder, more tolerant, and a little muddleheaded” when dealing with matters of the family. Her forgiveness bears fruit in the form of the warm companionship and support she enjoys with Lin’s father. This sends a strong pedagogical message to the audience that it is possible for a marriage to remain intact if one is willing to forgive. In contrast, Haizao’s mother (Dwelling) adopts the role of the disciplinary mother. She attempts to beat Haizao with a coat hanger when she finds out that her daughter is pregnant with Song Siming’s child (Episode 31). She describes Haizao’s decision as “the wrong path” and is emphatic that abortion is the only way to right this wrong. She argues that abortion will allow her daughter to start life anew in a relationship she describes as “open and aboveboard,” which will culminate in marriage. When Haizao rejects her mother’s disciplining, her lover dies in a car accident and she has a miscarriage. She loses her ability to speak for two months after these double tragedies and pays the ultimate price, losing her reproductive abilities. Luo Li’s mother (Lawyers), Li Chunhua, extends this pedagogical approach by adopting the role of public counsellor as a talk show host. Li describes Luo’s profession as “wicked” because it focuses on separating the family (Episode 9). Instead, she promotes reconciliation as an alternative. She counsels couples to remain together by propounding traditional family values, such as the need for daughters-in-law to consider the filial obligations of sons when managing their relationship with their mothers-in-law (Episode 25). Her rising ratings and the effectiveness of her strategy in bringing estranged couples like Miao Jinxiu and Dong Dahai back together (Episode 26) challenges the transgressive powers of mistresses by preventing the separation of families. More importantly, as with Haizao’s and Lin’s mothers, the moral force of Li’s position and the alternatives to divorce that she suggests draw on pre-socialist and socialist understandings of family values that underscore the sanctity of marriage to the audience. By reminding errant daughters of deeply embedded cultural standards of what it means to be a woman in Chinese society, these mothers are moral exemplars who restrain the potentiality of daughters becoming mistresses. ConclusionMarket reforms have led to a transformation in understandings of womanhood in post-socialist China. Depictions of mistresses and single women as independent, economically successful, and sexually liberated underscores the emergence of liberal forms of post-socialist femininity. Although adept at navigating the new market economy, these types of post-socialist women threaten the integrity of the family and need to be controlled. Moral arguments articulated by wives and mothers restrain the potentially destructive powers of post-socialist womanhood by drawing on deeply embedded understandings of the rights of women shaped in pre-socialist China. It is by disciplining liberal forms of post-socialist femininity such that they fit back into deeply embedded gender hierarchies that social order is restored. 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Introduction Wooden toys have been a staple in many family homes. Even LEGO's iconic plastic building blocks had humble beginnings as wooden toys (Lauwaert). Arguably, the materiality of wooden toys evokes normative feelings of nostalgia for a simpler past, where the uncomplicated nature of the wooden product provided the space for all sorts of imaginative play. It is through this lens that we find the adaptation of wooden toys into playsets that emulate particular vocations, like a doctor's kit and a carpenter's toolbox, an interesting entry point to consider the boundary of what is an acceptable toy within the contemporary wooden toy genre. And it is the blurry nature of this boundary, as exemplified by public outcry regarding a wooden vlogger set that had a ringlight, which is the subject of this article. In Australia in May 2022, global supermarket chain Aldi released a set of wooden toys for children aged 3+ based on various technologies used in contemporary jobs in the creative industries (Wannis). These ‘futuristic’ role-play toy sets (Kanna)—which sat alongside more ‘traditional’ vocation sets about transport, cooking, and manufacturing—included a wooden laptop set, a DJ set, and a vlogger set. The vlogger set came with a rope-like ringlight on a tripod, a wooden point-and-shoot camera, mobile phone device, and remote microphone with a receiver (see fig. 1 & 2). The wooden vlogger set replicates the real-life experience of using a ringlight, a round, donut-like light that often attaches to a recording device or a tripod to create an even lighting effect. The ringlight has become a symbol of content creation on social media and the Influencer industry—a cultural practice and line of work that often evokes negative connotations (Abidin, "Aren’t These"). And we see these negative connotations evidenced through an instance of public criticism on social media about the wooden vlogger set, which stands as a proxy for more significant concerns about children and digital media. Fig. 1 & 2: Outer box of wooden vlogger set, sold at Aldi in May 2022. (Photo by authors.) First shared as a story on Instagram by a private account, a follower and journalist then re-shared an image of the box for the wooden vlogger set to Twitter with the caption ‘it’s a no for me’. Many public comments under this tweet agreed with the original poster’s sentiment, calling the toy ‘exploitative’ and ‘dire’, exclaiming ‘wtf [what the fuck]’ and ‘absolutely not’. Other comments mocked the toy by joking ‘like and subscribe’ and rebranded it as ‘my little influencer’; a take on the popular 1980s toy series My Little Pony. This public opposition to the wooden vlogger set stands out as an interesting case study to interrogate how the convergence of wooden toys with contemporary technologies (re)surfaces moral panic regarding children and digital media. The wooden vlogger set, and specifically the symbolism of the toy ringlight, forms the basis of a case study into how digital technologies provoke moral panic about children’s (future) media practices. We highlight in this article that while moral panic about young people and their relationship with new media is a longstanding practice, the development of new media technologies—including the ringlight which is used to aid digital media production—evokes what Marwick calls technopanic, that is, exaggerated fears about young people's online practices which result in the denial or removal of access to said technologies. While we take the stance that content creation on social media is a valid and valuable practice, in this article we highlight how toys like the wooden vlogger set continue to be met with trepidation from some adults due to their connections with taking selfies and the Influencer industry on social media—as evidenced by the social media comments mentioned above. Furthermore, we argue in this article that these technopanics, evidenced by the public outcry on social media to the wooden vlogger set, obscure the opportunity that toys that replicate digital media technologies can afford, such as developing media literacy through playful, offline, and analogue ways. In the first section of the article, we argue that the toy ringlight acts as a proxy for media practices that endorses young children spending time online in ways that some consider problematic. We argue that these fears are an illustration of technopanic. In the second section of the article, we argue how the toy ringlight offers children a way to connect with imagined futures (and the present) by mimicking the everyday media practices they see elsewhere—through their families, media consumption, and popular culture. Studies have shown how children’s play can sometimes be based on popular culture, including television programs (Marsh and Bishop). We argue that as children today watch content creators on YouTube Kids and their parents use technology, they are learning about everyday media practices. The wooden vlogger set offers a way for children to explore those practices. We conclude the article by advocating that opposition to the wooden vlogger set is misdirected energy, as the critical skills of media literacy can be nurtured precisely through play with toys like the ringlight and wooden vlogger set. Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children! The public outcry over this wooden vlogger set is another example of moral panic regarding children and their participation with the media. Moral panic is defined as an overreaction to a perceived social problem; they are often temporal, in the sense of being short-lived, and the media are known as a driving factor that reproduces and compounds the supposed concerns (Critcher; Hall). Historical illustrations of moral panics are known to involve youths and youth culture with the example of ‘mod and rockers’ in the 1960s (Cohen), ‘youth gangs’ in the 1980s (Zatz), and more recently, the ‘Tide-Pod Challenge’ that conjured panic about youths eating dishwashing pods for clout on social media (Sleight-Price et al.). By framing public opposition to the wooden vlogger set as an example of moral panic, we aim to draw attention to the media ecology which this toy signifies, and critically unpack the ways in which it plays into longstanding concerns about children and new media. To critically examine the moral panic about the vlogger set, we first draw attention to the vocation imitated through the wooden toy: a vlogger. The term ‘vlogger’ stands for ‘video-blogger’, a dominant form of user-created content shared on social media platforms like YouTube, that centres on recording the ‘ordinary’ aspects of one's life (Burgess and Green). It is important to underscore that engaging in practices of vlogging does not inherently mean that this is one's vocation, as a person can vlog as a hobby or creative outlet. But the more contemporary term associated with being a vlogger, that is, an ‘Influencer’, muddles the conception of what it means to vlog due to the increasing platformisation of cultural production (Duffy et al.). An Influencer is an ordinary Internet user who has accumulated “a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles” who then “monetise their following by integrating advertorials into their blog or social media posts” (Abidin, "Aren’t These" 3). Advertorials—a term that combines ‘advertising’ and ‘editorial’—are the “highly personalised, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that Influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee” (Abidin, "Micro­microcelebrity" par. 3). The increasing commercialisation of content creation on digital media platforms has been met with criticism regarding the erosion of authenticity (Arriagada and Bishop). This is because Influencers are seen to adapt their media practices, and arguably part of themselves, to fit the logics of the platform, such as producing particular types of content to increase views, like taking ‘selfies’. One of the key signifiers of vlogging or being an Influencer on social media is ‘the selfie’, a self-made image of oneself, for which the ringlight plays a central role. Ringlights are used “to take brighter, clearer, high-resolution photographs” or videos, wherein the “even” lighting avoids casting “unsightly shadows” on faces and bodies (Abidin, "Aren’t These" 12). It is this utility of the ringlight that evokes conceptions that dismiss posting selfies as “frivolous and self-absorbed” (Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 78). Selfies have been argued as promoting “negative feminine stereotypes” such as “feminine vanity and triviality” as they are seen to be performative of particular conceptions around beauty (Burns 1716-1718). As such, Abidin argues in “‘Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?’: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity”, drawing on the work of Dobson and Coffey, that selfies anchor moral panics over the safety and wellbeing, particularly of women, online. Again, while we take the stance that no value judgement ought to be cast towards the use of ringlights in touching up appearances, as lighting is often used as a tool in both everyday and commercial media production, we argue that the toy ringlight brings forth these anxieties around vanity for some adults. The toy ringlight manifests these grievances about Influencers and, specifically, child influencers. Controversy about child influencers or ‘kidfluencers’ continues to fuel debate about the presence and exploitation of children in online media entertainment. A media practice known as “sharenting”, where parents share footage of their children as they grow up online (Blum-Rose), means that children can amass large followings on social media and become “micro-microcelebrities” (Abidin, "Micromicrocelebrity"). Notably, one of the public comments in opposition to the wooden vlogger set situated their grievance in the fact that the toy is designed for children aged 3+; as though the toy advocates for the notion of kidinfluencers—a prospect framed in the comment as inherently problematic. While the existence of kidfluencers is complex in nature—as both rewarding and challenging outcomes surmount from the practice—concerns about children’s privacy and online exploitation experiences dominate the issue. The problematic nature of child influencers is exemplified through notorious cases such as YouTube channel DaddyOFive, where the children’s reactions to ‘pranks’ were exploited for views (Leaver and Abidin). And issues regarding children promoting products or services online are raised through examples such as child unboxing videos on YouTube (Craig and Cunningham). Concerns regarding child influencers understandably call for greater consideration of how children participate with online media practices. It is essential to critically examine exploitative commercialisation practices and champion children’s right to privacy (Livingstone et al.; Verdoodt et al.). At the same time, it is important to remember that not all media produced by children, or by parents with children, are inherently harmful. The notion that children have this innate innocence that needs protection from the media is an established trope known to spur moral panic. Panic around mass media and their ‘bad’ influence on youth and youth culture, including children, is not a new phenomenon (Springhall). For example, media theorist Neil Postman famously argued in the 1980s that the “new media environment, with television at its centre, is leading to the rapid disappearance of childhood” (286). It is an argument that suggests that children’s increasingly mediated lives through communication technologies ‘force’ them to live in an ‘adult’s world’; thus eroding their childhood. We argue that the toy ringlight in the wooden vlogger set stimulates this same type of thinking, as though playing with the toy will ‘force’ children into the ‘adult world’ of social media production—which is not exclusively true. Through this lens, we also extend our argument that the opposition to the toy is not only a moral panic but, specifically, a technopanic. Panics occur when adults begin to be excluded from the ways young people engage with the media (Leick). The toy ringlight—as a proxy to ‘unsavoury’ new media practices—thus taps into a generational concern. A concept that helps explain this phenomenon is what Marwick calls a technopanic. Technopanics relies on the idea that harm will come to children through the use of new media technologies, and thus a justification is made to restrict access. In this way, the potential benefits of engaging with new media technologies, like the toy ringlight, are ignored in favour of focussing on the negative and exaggerated harms the media cause (Buckingham). This opposition fails to recognise that as technologies and media practices emerge, there are new risks but also new opportunities for children (Livingstone). Developing Media Literacy through the Toy Ringlight Ringlights are now prolific, not only among Influencers or those involved in social media production. Interest in ringlights has grown considerably since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with searches for the term rising dramatically in March 2020 (Google Trend for ‘Ring Light’). Although the toy ringlight in the wooden vlogger set is not digital, in that there are no electronic components and it does not connect to any networks, there are opportunities for the toy to help children develop digital media literacy understandings from an early age through playful exploration. Above, we have discussed how adults perceive the toy ringlight and how it mirrors the everyday and commercial media practices of adults, which can be confronting for some. Here, we examine how children could explore the toy ringlight through play. Children learn about technology through everyday familial practices (Plowman and Stevenson). Those children without access to a ringlight in their everyday life will likely treat the toy differently from what the toy creators anticipated. However, children who share technology practices with their families (e.g. seeing parents use a ringlight for Zoom meetings) or learn these through popular culture (e.g. seeing ringlights used by their favourite content creators on YouTube Kids) will have a different set of practices more closely aligned to the intended use of a toy ringlight to play and experiment with. Ringlights are part of the fabric of everyday life for many people and their use is not inherently positive or negative. Instead, they contribute to our increasingly complex media practices. Toys and everyday tools provided across different aspects of children’s lives offer ways to engage with and transfer knowledge of cultural and everyday experiences (Sheina et al.). The ringlight as an object can provide opportunities for children to play with the material practices of media production in ways that reflect the cultural experiences and practices they are part of. Bird contends that technologies, including non-working technologies such as old keyboards and phones, provide children with opportunities to engage with concepts related to the digital, as they bring to life experiences they have observed through imaginative play. We argue that the toy ringlight is situated within the concept of converged play, where the boundary between digital and non-digital play has blurred significantly (Marsh; Wood et al.). The material and the digital can be attended to when we consider how young children engage in play (Marsh et al.). Through play with material objects, like the wooden vlogger set and the toy ringlight, children engage with their worlds and learn the processes, practices, and concepts of media production. Pretend play can support children’s exploration of digital ideas (Vogt and Hollenstein) as they learn to communicate and tell stories. In a media production sense, Buckingham says that children and young people can deepen their understanding of the media by imitating media forms and styles. Playing with technology can serve similar purposes to playing with traditional toys (Robb and Lauricella). Similarly, we argue that children playing with toys that replicate social media production, such as the wooden vlogger set, are also developing early understandings of media literacy. As young children tell stories, play, and communicate with friends through new digital technologies, they develop an understanding of the media. Media literacy, the ability to critically engage with the media in our everyday lives (Australia Media Literacy Alliance), develops over time (Potter). The toy ringlight does not have to be positioned as problematic as per the technopanic we described earlier. Instead, it offers opportunities for children to explore and reflect on the key concepts of media literacy: technologies, institutions, representations, languages, audiences, and relationships. There are two scenarios where the concept of technologies could be central to children's play using the wooden vlogger set and toy ringlight. Firstly, the toy has multiple components that work together. Children can explore how the camera, light and lapel microphone connect to the device. They can consider if they need all these components and play the different roles required to operate the technology. Secondly, by incorporating the toy into their play, children can develop understandings of the role of digital technology in their lives and how it impacts or shapes media practices. Technologies allow or prevent certain choices from being made (Lüders; Williamson). The wooden vlogger set operates similarly, although children can use the toy outside of these constraints, resulting in forms of disruption. The practices of engaging with media technologies can be bound socially and culturally (du Gay et al.), and through materials (Burnett and Merchant); as children, the wooden vlogger set, and their context come into relation with each other. While the technology is visible to children and adults in this case, working in conjunction with the notion of using technology is the idea of how we use technology to distribute or share our media productions. This refers to the concept of institutions, which offers a lens for how to examine the business of the media and who benefits from media production and distribution—including media platforms—politically, socially, and economically (Alvarado). The inclusion of the small device that looks like a mobile phone in the wooden vlogger set hints at the toy privileging sharing and distribution practices. The various app icons painted on the wooden toy phone provide an opportunity for children to play with the idea of sharing their productions with others. Some children might play with ideas of uploading their productions to YouTube or other social media platforms if that is something they have been exposed to, integrating the digital and non-digital. Media productions do not exist in a technological vacuum. We use media technologies to communicate meaning and tell stories—we (re)present people, places, events, and ideas for a range of purposes (Masterman) through the construction of codes and conventions (Buckingham). Through incorporating the wooden vlogger set into their play, children can experiment with different media forms and representations, where they might, for instance, depict characters (e.g. heroes or villains), locations (e.g. school, the supermarket or space), events (e.g. going to the hairdresser or making food), and simple ideas (e.g. it is cold in winter). While some children may create imaginative worlds where the toy ringlight is part of a wider dramatic story, as per the examples just provided, there are also opportunities for children to act out and produce different forms of media, for example a television show. Children often draw on popular culture understandings to practise and re-enact scenarios (Gillen et al.; Merchant). In doing this, children play with the part of a narrative and consider how media texts are constructed, an important aspect of media languages. As they play with media production ideas, children can decide who might view their content and how they can ensure their audience understands their message—essentially playing with how to encode and decode texts (Morley). As they engage in dramatic play, children might also show different understandings of popular culture texts they enjoy, offering insights into how children understand media productions aimed at their age group, including those produced by child influencers. The wooden vlogger set, most importantly, is a material through which children can consider the relationships between media producers and their audiences (Dezuanni). This brings us to the crux of where we believe the outrage about the wooden vlogger set and toy ringlight lies. The toy ringlight normalises ideas around children developing relationships through and with the media—perhaps as an Influencer or perhaps as a casual vlogger. But the toys of today may not even prepare children for the cultural practices of tomorrow. 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The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html>. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McNair, Brian. "Vote!." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>. APA Style McNair, B. (Apr. 2008) "Vote!," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>.

The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. < http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html >. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006.

Introduction Despite the expansive and multimodal realm of Chinese Boys’ Love (BL) culture (also known as danmei in Chinese), audio works have been notably absent from scholarly discussions, with the focus predominantly being on novels (e.g. Bai; Zhang). This article aims to fill this gap by delving into the transformative impact of sound on narrative engagement within the Chinese BL culture. Focussing on the audio drama adaptations of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (modao zushi, hereafter Grandmaster), originally a serialised Chinese BL novel, this analysis aims to unravel the meticulously crafted BL fantasy in these auditory renditions. The audio drama format delivers an intimate storytelling experience directly to the listener’s ears. Unlike textual media, audio dramas allow listeners to immerse themselves in narratives during various daily activities, deepening their connection with the content. The audio drama Grandmaster, produced by the renowned Chinese platform MissEvan, has garnered a vast fan base and over 640 million plays across three seasons (the episodes and numbers of plays can be found on MissEvan: Season 1, Season 2, and Season 3). Unlike the serialised Web-drama adaption diluted by censorship regulations, the audio drama retains the utmost BL fidelity to the original novel, highlighting the significant potential of this medium in the Chinese BL culture. BL culture has surged in popularity within China, partly due to the export of Japanese culture and the burgeoning Chinese Internet accessibility (Feng). The BL genre encompasses diverse media forms such as novels, fanfiction, comics, animation, and audio/Web dramas, rooted in shared fantasies of romantic love between men. The growing interest in BL culture reflects a response to societal structures like Confucianism and the oppressive education system, which, due to their restrictedness, inadvertently foster the exploration of alternative narratives and identities within the genre (Kwon). While initially inspired by Japanese subculture, Chinese BL has evolved under diverse global influences, including American and other Asian subcultures (Lavin et al.). Chinese BL narratives delve into themes of identity, sexuality, power dynamics, and societal norms, reflecting a rich blend of modern and traditional Chinese culture (Madill and Zhao). Moreover, the rise of BL fandom has empowered female readers to engage in questions about gendered politics, questions that enable them to turn a voyeuristic gaze upon men (Zhang). The versatility of Chinese BL media reflects not only the evolving nature of the genre but also its enduring appeal and cultural significance within contemporary Chinese society. This article initiates a concise review of audio drama in China and the transformative impact of earphone technology, shifting listening experiences from public to intimate settings. It subsequently explores the intricate interplay between Chinese BL novels and audio dramas, elucidating the unique dynamics involved. The analysis then examines specific scenes from Grandmaster, providing insights into its role in facilitating a mesmerising BL audio fantasy. Grandmaster, originating as an Internet novel, has gained a dedicated following. MissEvan, recognising its potential, secured copyrights and commissioned Triones Penguin Studio for a radio drama adaptation in Mandarin. This full-cast dramatisation involves skilled editors, playwrights, and composers, thereby enriching character portrayals and interactions. The professional teamwork and meticulous oversight at each production stage guaranteed regular updates and high audio quality (Shao). Despite the collaborative nature of teamwork, I argue that the power of sound technology personalises the auditory journey as it creates an immersive experience for individual listeners. My analyses mainly rely on research involving actual listeners, along with examinations of specific content within Grandmaster with an idealised listener in consideration, to elucidate the factors contributing to its auditory allure. This examination contributes to a nuanced understanding of Chinese BL culture and its constitutive relationship to audio. From Public Broadcasting to Intimate Voicing: Audio Drama in China Radio broadcasting in China, with roots dating back to the early twentieth century, initially served as a propaganda instrument for mass mobilisation and communication. Chinese storytelling, rooted in acoustics, emphasises the sensory appeal of sound (Chan). It intertwines oral and written traditions in classical literature, particularly fiction and drama (Børdahl). Local vernaculars commonly feature in oral storytelling traditions, whereas Chinese radio programs adopt Mandarin to foster a cohesive national identity via linguistic uniformity. The Communist Party tactically expanded its audience through a radio reception network, establishing a wired broadcasting infrastructure with over 100 million loudspeakers by the 1970s. This revolutionised politics, everyday life, and perceptions of time and space (Li). The interplay between radio and social change reflected China’s pursuit of modernity, as the Communist Party utilised radio to institute a national communication system and monopolise news production. Radio thus served as a crucial tool for constructing and sustaining revolutionary fervor (Lei; He). Radio dramas, often cross-media adaptations from edited films in the 1970s, contributed to everyday sensory pleasure amidst a totalising revolutionary soundscape (Huang). The growth of radio and loudspeaker infrastructure played diverse roles in the revolution, fostering political communication, labour mobilisation, propaganda, surveillance, and even nurturing the Mao cult, turning radio drama into a potent tool for mass mobilisation and communication (Li). As a result, before the widespread availability of televisions in the 1990s, radio structured Chinese people’s daily activities and served as the primary information medium. Technological advancements in earphones, transitioning from larger wired headphones to smaller wireless earbuds like AirPods, have shifted auditory experiences in China from a collective identity tool used in political propaganda to a medium for individualistic entertainment. This change is marked by the personal nature of headphone usage, which can extend social interactions in and beyond physical dimensions (Grusin). The transition from wired headphones to wireless earbuds implements the interiorisation of one person’s body/voice within another, initiating a profound connection that transcends physical limitations (Stankievech). Since 2018, wireless earbuds have exceeded wired headphones in output value in China (Insight and Info), with the online audio market surging to 22 billion yuan in 2021, a 67.9% increase year-on-year. Audiobooks and audio dramas are the most popular genres, with a predominantly female audience under forty who prefer listening at night after work (iimedia). Among audio dramas, BL works generate the most traffic and revenue in China (Y. Wang). Along with such content, putting wireless earbuds inside the ear intensifies the intimacy of listening, transmitting voices directly into the listener’s head and sitting alongside their thoughts (Weldon). This physical closeness underscores the exclusive bond between the listener and the audio content, redefining oral narratives and transforming public and political audio content into a more personal and intimate medium. The use of wireless earbuds even extends listening beyond mere auditory experience, empowering haptic sensations that create an intimate bond. The acousmatic voice envelops the listener’s ears, establishing a connection even before the message’s content is considered (Madsen and Potts). The ear’s sensitivity prompts consciousness and memory, unlocking the imaginative world (C. Wang 91-94). This sensory engagement surpasses traditional auditory limits, resembling a physical encounter where listeners feel like their body has joined with the body of sound. Dermot Rattigan, discussing radio drama, notes how listeners fill the void with mental visualisations and imagination, entering a state of individual ‘virtual reality’ through aural stimulation (Rattigan 118). Drawing from visual psychology, Shaffer likens the soundscape to a dynamic landscape painting, emphasising the fluidity of auditory experiences (Schafer). Listening becomes a multi-dimensional journey involving the entire body and mind, a compelling tool for reception and connection that transcends reality’s boundaries. The advent of MP3 technologies and the podcasting boom also extends the former spatial and temporal limitations of listening. In contrast to traditional real-time broadcasting, MP3 technologies enable voices to persist indefinitely into the future (Madsen and Potts). This temporal flexibility further builds a private sound sphere for listeners (Euritt). Listeners no longer need to share time and space with others around loudspeakers or radios, so they can freely indulge in their subcultural preferences, such as BL stories, without concern for societal judgment. Many listeners strategically incorporate audio dramas into their daily schedule, choosing moments of solitude such as before sleep or upon waking, where they can detach from the expectations of their physical space and identity roles. This is particularly evident among devoted fans of Chinese BL audio dramas, who carve out personal time for these works and seek a quiet space for focussed engagement (Wang 55). This intentional, focussed engagement differs from the typical mode of everyday radio listening as it serves an expanded, widespread dissemination environment that is also highly intimate (Madsen and Potts). Thus, the convergence of temporal flexibility and immersive technology shapes listener engagement and interaction dynamics. The fusion of intimacy, physical closeness, and temporal flexibility heightens the allure of the voice in programs with erotic undertones, such as BL audio dramas. Euritt introduces the concept of ‘breathing out into you’ to explain queer eroticism in podcasts, emphasising shared breaths and potential haptic exchanges that enhance the sensual dimensions of sound (Euritt 27-53). This wireless, intimately riveting auditory experience transforms the soundscape and reshapes contemporary social interactions. This shift is particularly noteworthy for popular Chinese radio and audio content as they began as a public, propaganda-oriented tool and transitioned into forms as novel as the intimate domain of BL audio dramas. This change underscores the transformative power of sound in shaping interactions, surpassing conventional storytelling boundaries, and ushering in a new era of engaging narratives. The 2.5-Dimensional: Auralising Chinese Boys’ Love Fiction The BL genre emerges as a cultural and social force that can potentially challenge traditional Chinese values. Its focus on male-male love inherently questions societal expectations around gender and sexuality in ways that disrupt Confucian ideology’s emphasis on heterosexual marriage and lineage (Welker). Furthermore, the genre’s similarity to the melodramatic ‘soap opera’ storytelling style resonates with Western ideals of individualism and aligns more with a feminist viewpoint that contrasts with the male-dominant heterosexism often found in traditional Chinese narratives (Mumford). This emphasis on individual desires also implicitly disputes the collectivist and socialist values, as well as the importance of the extended family, traditionally embraced in Chinese cultures. In short, the love, sex, and romance depicted in BL represent a departure from traditional Chinese values, positioning the BL genre as a vehicle for cultural exchange and societal transformation in terms of gender norms. The surge of Internet radio and social media in the 2010s has substantially contributed to the professionalisation and commercialisation of Chinese BL audio dramas. MissEvan, a prominent barrage-audio and live-broadcasting Website, has been crucial to this proliferation (Hu et al.). Before the advent of commercial dubbing, enthusiasts of BL novels voluntarily recorded non-profit Chinese audio dramas and disseminated them online. The popularity of BL novels subsequently prompted their adaptation into animation and television dramas, creating a demand for dubbing services. This demand inaugurated a niche for professional voice actors to hone and showcase their skills. The integration of technology and capital by commercial production teams has markedly elevated the quality of Chinese BL audio dramas. Amidst tightening censorship in 2021, Chinese BL online novels and their television/Web-drama adaptations faced restrictions. Audio drama emerged as a less restrictive medium, which can relatively directly present explicit gay relationships (Hu et al.). Listeners of Chinese BL audio dramas typically read the online novel beforehand, engaging in dual consumption for pleasure in both reading and listening (Wang 58). Their engagement transcends plot comprehension, focussing instead on appreciating sophisticated voice performances. Exploring how audio dramas derived from novels can transcend textual narratives and captivate audiences has become a central focus in the production process, highlighting the flourishing landscape of audio drama. The listening process provides informed listeners with a re-experience, offering multiple sensory and emotional pleasures by translating words into voice and sounds. Unlike film and television dubbing, which requires synchronisation with actors’ lip movements and speech rhythms, dubbing for animation, audio dramas, and games gives greater creative autonomy to voice actors. The thriving market for audio dramas has shaped the Chinese dubbing industry, cultivating a devoted fan base for previously overlooked voice actors. The character voices (CVs, also known as voice actors, or VAs) have emerged as central figures, attracting fans and driving media traffic. In the late 2010s, collaborations between MissEvan and renowned CVs resulted in the adaptation of popular online fiction into paid audio dramas, exemplified by Grandmaster, which aired in 2017 and 2018 (Hu et al.). Fans’ motivation for engaging with BL audio dramas extends beyond intertextual and trans-media entertainment but incorporates an appreciation for their beloved CVs, thereby fostering a culture of support within the burgeoning Chinese BL audio drama market. In the storytelling of aural media, CVs are crucial in bridging the auditor’s BL imagination between the text and the characters as their performances breathe life into characters. CVs fill a gap between two-dimensional works (fiction, comic, and animation) and the three-dimensional real world, forging ‘2.5-dimensional’ content. This term originated in the 1970s-80s to describe anime voice actors, who imbue two-dimensional characters with a sense of existence and generate interrelations between the real, fictional, and cyber worlds (Sugawa-Shimada and Annett). In BL audio dramas, CVs commonly stimulate listeners’ sensations through male moans that facilitate an erotic flow between sound and body, arousing desire through the auditory channel. The incorporation of scenes with sexual innuendo between the male protagonists creates a space for listeners to indulge in these moments with earphones on, enveloped in their own private, eroticised sphere of engagement between fiction and reality. The deliberate pauses, gasps, and panting become the silent dialogue that intertwines inner voices with external narratives, enhancing comprehensive sensory engagement for listeners. Audio Fantasy in Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation Grandmaster is a seminal Chinese BL novel that blends martial arts, supernatural fantasies, and emotional depth. Set in a richly imagined world where immortal cultivation techniques bestow individuals with extraordinary powers, the story follows protagonists Wei Wuxian’s and Lan Wangji’s intertwined fates. Its captivating narrative and nuanced characters have garnered a global fanbase, solidifying its place as a cornerstone of Chinese BL literature and media. The audio drama Grandmaster faithfully mirrors the novel’s narrative structure, unfolding from the protagonist Wei’s perspective after his reincarnation, weaving memories of his past and present life, including his romantic involvement with Lan. Wei’s establishment of the forbidden Demonic Path leads to his death, but he is reincarnated thirteen years later and reunites with Lan. After his reincarnation, Wei gradually realises Lan’s concealed profound affection and scarification for him. Diverging from the television/Web-drama adaptation, which replaces the romance with platonic ‘bromance’ due to censorship (Lei), the audio drama accentuates the impassioned soundscapes of their relationship. The three-season series, comprising episodes of 30-40 minutes, offers the first three episodes for free, with subsequent content requiring payment (approximately four to six dollars per season). Impressively, the series has driven earnings exceeding $1.5 million (Asia Business Leaders). This success highlights the captivating and profitable potential of audio dramas as a BL storytelling medium. Unlike the original novel, which uses an omniscient narrator, the audio drama advances the plot solely through character dialogue. Consequently, listeners navigate the storyline guided by the rhythm of the CVs’ delivery and the accompanying music. Different from Japanese BL audio dramas that feature as ‘voice porn’ for women (Ishida), Grandmaster subtly implies the romance between Lan and Wei, with the most intimate interactions limited to kisses. Rather than sexually explicit content, the drama focusses on the characters’ affective fulfillment after a prolonged thirteen-year anticipation. For instance, in Season 1, Episode 4, Wei attempts to hide his identity and flee from Lan. When Wei creeps back towards Lan’s bed to steal the pass for exiting Lan’s residence, Lan catches him. Rather than simply saying ‘Get off’ as in the novel, Lan instructs Wei in the audio drama to ‘Get off from my body,’ offering listeners additional physical contact cues (the quotes from the novel and audio drama in this article are translations from Chinese to English). Following Wei’s intentional refusal, the CV Wei Chao, portraying Lan, strategically breathes before his next line, ‘then stay like this for the whole night’. The breath conveys Lan’s deep, restrained affection and evokes the listener’s nuanced emotional resonance. To represent Lan’s affection within his minimal and often monosyllabic lines requires the CV to convey emotions through breaths and intonations, which commonly elicit an autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) in listeners. ASMR is a tingling sensation often triggered by soft low-tone spoken or whispered voices (Barratt and Davis). Wei Chao intentionally lowers his voice to interpret how Lan’s sighs encapsulate unspoken sentiments (Wei). In contrast, the CV Lu Zhixing employs a playful and sweet tone in his portrayal of Wei Wuxian. When Lu delivers flirtatious lines, online real-time comments frequently express listeners’ admiration, suggesting that his voice is even more captivating than women’s. The contrasting restraint and playfulness intensify the listener’s empathy for Lan’s unspeakable passion. Thus, Lan’s subtle expressions of his restrained love become the primary attraction for listeners (KikuHonda). The high-quality sound further amplifies the breath sounds, making each of Lan’s ‘hmm’ responses—indifferent, melancholy, or indulgent—a nuanced emotional trigger. Listeners, through their wireless earbuds, engage in the meticulously crafted expressions of Lan within a profoundly personal soundscape. This listening mode is a crucial component of the overall enthralling auditory voyage, augmenting the appreciation of the characters’ subdued emotions. The layered integration of music and sound in Grandmaster constructs a three-dimensional sonic storytelling landscape. Effective soundscapes for storytelling are crafted by multiple dimensions: sound source, temporal progression, simultaneous layers, and spatialisation. Sound editing allows for source selection, with listeners experiencing these dimensions as integrated, not separate or sequential (Stedman et al.). The audio drama Grandmaster distinguishes itself from the novel by using voice flashbacks for narrative enhancement. In Season Three, Episode 12, when Lan’s brother recounts Lan’s sacrifice for Wei, particularly the moment when Lan endured severe punishment to save Wei thirteen years ago, the soundscape instantly transports listeners to that intense scene. Listeners vividly hear the swishing force of the whip and its impact, immersing them in the sounds of Lan’s anguish and unwavering love. This direct auditory impact allows listeners to feel as if they are experiencing the events firsthand, physically sensing the hardships encountered by the protagonists in understanding each other’s affection, intensifying their hard-won love. The musical orchestration and vocal interplay are also pivotal to conveying the story. In the storyline, Wei and Lan showcase proficiency in their respective instruments: Wei with the flute and Lan with the guqin (a seven-string Chinese zither). The tonal features of these instruments—the flute’s melodious brightness and the guqin’s deep lingering resonance—symbolise the protagonists’ distinct personalities, adding ingenious layers to their relationship. In the Guanyin Temple scene (Season Three, Episode 13), as Wei confesses to Lan, the initial background music features the flute, guqin, and rain sounds, foreshadowing the confessional moment with Wei’s worries that Lan will not believe his words. As Wei promises to remember Lan’s every word from now on, the music incorporates the guzheng, a Chinese string instrument with a brighter timbre than guqin. The tremolo technique of guzheng is reminiscent of the characters’ heartstring vibrations. Through auditory cues, the narrative climaxes with Wei’s heartfelt confession of love for Lan. When Wei straightforwardly confesses, ‘I fancy you, I love you, I want you, I cannot leave you. … I do not want anyone but you—it cannot be anyone but you’ (Season Three, Episode 13), his heartfelt words are accompanied by layered sounds, including the duet of the flute and guqin, and the sound of thunder and rain, accelerating the affective climax. Lan echoes Wei’s words, underscored by erhu, thereby showing how this string instrument resembles humans’ sobbing voices through its sliding technique, rendering the touching melody. The heartbeat and rain sound with Lan’s panting highlight the painful loneliness of Lan’s thirteen-year wait. The intricate fusion of musical and vocal elements enables listeners to not only hear but also to feel the mutual affection between the characters, culminating in a sense of delight upon the disclosure of their reciprocal love following numerous adventures. Using earbuds amplifies listeners’ capacity to fully receive auditory details and stereo effects, thereby contributing to the popularity of BL audio dramas that skillfully convey unspoken love through detailed soundscapes. Epilogue The Grandmaster audio dramas provide crafted episodes that fulfill fans’ passionate needs that exceed the novel’s scope. In addition to adapting the novel, the team has conceived original mini-dramas that enrich the character images. Listeners can access additional content such as iconic quotes, ringtones, and ‘lullaby’ episodes recorded by the leading CVs, maximising the captivating power of sound and justifying listeners’ investment. The multi-layered use of sounds and instrumental arrangements effectively constructs a three-dimensional soundscape, reinforcing the audience’s understanding of the story and characters. Unlike television/Web-drama adaptations, the audio drama fully amplifies the tragic elements of the novel, pushing the immersed listener’s imagination past textual limitations. While casting choices and modelling in visual adaptions may disappoint viewers’ expectations at times, the audio drama leverages the power of sound to stimulate listeners’ imaginations, encouraging them to visualise their own specific character images. Skillful orchestration, along with sound effects, breaths, and dialogues in Grandmaster intensifies emotional expression, forming a rich and dimensional soundscape and unlocking new possibilities for audio drama artistic expression for Chinese BL fantasy. 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Introduction This article is a study in anxiety with regard to social online spaces (SOS) conceived of as dark. There are two possible ways to define ‘dark’ in this context. The first is that communication is dark because it either has limited distribution, is not open to all users (closed groups are a case example) or hidden. The second definition, linked as a result of the first, is the way that communication via these means is interpreted and understood. Dark social spaces disrupt the accepted top-down flow by the ‘gazing elite’ (data aggregators including social media), but anxious users might need to strain to notice what is out there, and this in turn destabilises one’s reception of the scene. In an environment where surveillance technologies are proliferating, this article examines contemporary, dark, interconnected, and interactive communications for the entangled affordances that might be brought to bear. A provocation is that resistance through counterveillance or “sousveillance” is one possibility. An alternative (or addition) is retreating to or building ‘dark’ spaces that are less surveilled and (perhaps counterintuitively) less fearful. This article considers critically the notion of dark social online spaces via four broad socio-technical concerns connected to the big social media services that have helped increase a tendency for fearful anxiety produced by surveillance and the perceived implications for personal privacy. It also shines light on the aspect of darkness where some users are spurred to actively seek alternative, dark social online spaces. Since the 1970s, public-key cryptosystems typically preserved security for websites, emails, and sensitive health, government, and military data, but this is now reduced (Williams). We have seen such systems exploited via cyberattacks and misappropriated data acquired by affiliations such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US elections. Via the notion of “parasitic strategies”, such events can be described as news/information hacks “whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies” (von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 88). In accord with Wilson and Serisier’s arguments (178), emerging technologies facilitate rapid data sharing, collection, storage, and processing wherein subsequent “outcomes are unpredictable”. This would also include the effect of acquiescence. In regard to our digital devices, for some, being watched overtly—through cameras encased in toys, computers, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) to digital street ads that determine the resonance of human emotions in public places including bus stops, malls, and train stations—is becoming normalised (McStay, Emotional AI). It might appear that consumers immersed within this Internet of Things (IoT) are themselves comfortable interacting with devices that record sound and capture images for easy analysis and distribution across the communications networks. A counter-claim is that mainstream social media corporations have cultivated a sense of digital resignation “produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper and Turow, 1824). Careful consumers’ trust in mainstream media is waning, with readers observing a strong presence of big media players in the industry and are carefully picking their publications and public intellectuals to follow (Mahmood, 6). A number now also avoid the mainstream internet in favour of alternate dark sites. This is done by users with “varying backgrounds, motivations and participation behaviours that may be idiosyncratic (as they are rooted in the respective person’s biography and circumstance)” (Quandt, 42). By way of connection with dark internet studies via Biddle et al. (1; see also Lasica), the “darknet” is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content … not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. As we note from the quote above, the “dark web” uses existing public and private networks that facilitate communication via the Internet. Gehl (1220; see also Gehl and McKelvey) has detailed that this includes “hidden sites that end in ‘.onion’ or ‘.i2p’ or other Top-Level Domain names only available through modified browsers or special software. Accessing I2P sites requires a special routing program ... . Accessing .onion sites requires Tor [The Onion Router]”. For some, this gives rise to social anxiety, read here as stemming from that which is not known, and an exaggerated sense of danger, which makes fight or flight seem the only options. This is often justified or exacerbated by the changing media and communication landscape and depicted in popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma or The Great Hack, which affect public opinion on the unknown aspects of internet spaces and the uses of personal data. The question for this article remains whether the fear of the dark is justified. Consider that most often one will choose to make one’s intimate bedroom space dark in order to have a good night’s rest. We might pleasurably escape into a cinema’s darkness for the stories told therein, or walk along a beach at night enjoying unseen breezes. Most do not avoid these experiences, choosing to actively seek them out. Drawing this thread, then, is the case made here that agency can also be found in the dark by resisting socio-political structural harms. 1. Digital Futures and Anxiety of the Dark Fear of the darkI have a constant fear that something's always nearFear of the darkFear of the darkI have a phobia that someone's always there In the lyrics to the song “Fear of the Dark” (1992) by British heavy metal group Iron Maiden is a sense that that which is unknown and unseen causes fear and anxiety. Holding a fear of the dark is not unusual and varies in degree for adults as it does for children (Fellous and Arbib). Such anxiety connected to the dark does not always concern darkness itself. It can also be a concern for the possible or imagined dangers that are concealed by the darkness itself as a result of cognitive-emotional interactions (McDonald, 16). Extending this claim is this article’s non-binary assertion that while for some technology and what it can do is frequently misunderstood and shunned as a result, for others who embrace the possibilities and actively take it on it is learning by attentively partaking. Mistakes, solecism, and frustrations are part of the process. Such conceptual theorising falls along a continuum of thinking. Global interconnectivity of communications networks has certainly led to consequent concerns (Turkle Alone Together). Much focus for anxiety has been on the impact upon social and individual inner lives, levels of media concentration, and power over and commercialisation of the internet. Of specific note is that increasing commercial media influence—such as Facebook and its acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Instagram, CRTL-labs (translating movements and neural impulses into digital signals), LiveRail (video advertising technology), Chainspace (Blockchain)—regularly changes the overall dynamics of the online environment (Turow and Kavanaugh). This provocation was born out recently when Facebook disrupted the delivery of news to Australian audiences via its service. Mainstream social online spaces (SOS) are platforms which provide more than the delivery of media alone and have been conceptualised predominantly in a binary light. On the one hand, they can be depicted as tools for the common good of society through notional widespread access and as places for civic participation and discussion, identity expression, education, and community formation (Turkle; Bruns; Cinque and Brown; Jenkins). This end of the continuum of thinking about SOS seems set hard against the view that SOS are operating as businesses with strategies that manipulate consumers to generate revenue through advertising, data, venture capital for advanced research and development, and company profit, on the other hand. In between the two polar ends of this continuum are the range of other possibilities, the shades of grey, that add contemporary nuance to understanding SOS in regard to what they facilitate, what the various implications might be, and for whom. By way of a brief summary, anxiety of the dark is steeped in the practices of privacy-invasive social media giants such as Facebook and its ancillary companies. Second are the advertising technology companies, surveillance contractors, and intelligence agencies that collect and monitor our actions and related data; as well as the increased ease of use and interoperability brought about by Web 2.0 that has seen a disconnection between technological infrastructure and social connection that acts to limit user permissions and online affordances. Third are concerns for the negative effects associated with depressed mental health and wellbeing caused by “psychologically damaging social networks”, through sleep loss, anxiety, poor body image, real world relationships, and the fear of missing out (FOMO; Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement). Here the harms are both individual and societal. Fourth is the intended acceleration toward post-quantum IoT (Fernández-Caramés), as quantum computing’s digital components are continually being miniaturised. This is coupled with advances in electrical battery capacity and interconnected telecommunications infrastructures. The result of such is that the ontogenetic capacity of the powerfully advanced network/s affords supralevel surveillance. What this means is that through devices and the services that they provide, individuals’ data is commodified (Neff and Nafus; Nissenbaum and Patterson). Personal data is enmeshed in ‘things’ requiring that the decisions that are both overt, subtle, and/or hidden (dark) are scrutinised for the various ways they shape social norms and create consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society (Gillespie). Data and personal information are retrievable from devices, sharable in SOS, and potentially exposed across networks. For these reasons, some have chosen to go dark by being “off the grid”, judiciously selecting their means of communications and their ‘friends’ carefully. 2. Is There Room for Privacy Any More When Everyone in SOS Is Watching? An interesting turn comes through counterarguments against overarching institutional surveillance that underscore the uses of technologies to watch the watchers. This involves a practice of counter-surveillance whereby technologies are tools of resistance to go ‘dark’ and are used by political activists in protest situations for both communication and avoiding surveillance. This is not new and has long existed in an increasingly dispersed media landscape (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes). For example, counter-surveillance video footage has been accessed and made available via live-streaming channels, with commentary in SOS augmenting networking possibilities for niche interest groups or micropublics (Wilson and Serisier, 178). A further example is the Wordpress site Fitwatch, appealing for an end to what the site claims are issues associated with police surveillance (fitwatch.org.uk and endpolicesurveillance.wordpress.com). Users of these sites are called to post police officers’ identity numbers and photographs in an attempt to identify “cops” that might act to “misuse” UK Anti-terrorism legislation against activists during legitimate protests. Others that might be interested in doing their own “monitoring” are invited to reach out to identified personal email addresses or other private (dark) messaging software and application services such as Telegram (freeware and cross-platform). In their work on surveillance, Mann and Ferenbok (18) propose that there is an increase in “complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies”. By way of critical definition, Mann and Ferenbok (25) clarify that “where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance, but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance”. It is the aspect of sousveillance that is empowering to those using dark SOS. One might consider that not all surveillance is “bad” nor institutionalised. It is neither overtly nor formally regulated—as yet. Like most technologies, many of the surveillant technologies are value-neutral until applied towards specific uses, according to Mann and Ferenbok (18). But this is part of the ‘grey area’ for understanding the impact of dark SOS in regard to which actors or what nations are developing tools for surveillance, where access and control lies, and with what effects into the future. 3. Big Brother Watches, So What Are the Alternatives: Whither the Gazing Elite in Dark SOS? By way of conceptual genealogy, consideration of contemporary perceptions of surveillance in a visually networked society (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes) might be usefully explored through a revisitation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, applied here as a metaphor for contemporary surveillance. Arguably, this is a foundational theoretical model for integrated methods of social control (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 192-211), realised in the “panopticon” (prison) in 1787 by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham and Božovič, 29-95) during a period of social reformation aimed at the improvement of the individual. Like the power for social control over the incarcerated in a panopticon, police power, in order that it be effectively exercised, “had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible … like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 213–4). In grappling with the impact of SOS for the individual and the collective in post-digital times, we can trace out these early ruminations on the complex documentary organisation through state-controlled apparatuses (such as inspectors and paid observers including “secret agents”) via Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 214; Subject and Power, 326-7) for comparison to commercial operators like Facebook. Today, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition technology (FRT), and closed-circuit television (CCTV) for video surveillance are used for social control of appropriate behaviours. Exemplified by governments and the private sector is the use of combined technologies to maintain social order, from ensuring citizens cross the street only on green lights, to putting rubbish in the correct recycling bin or be publicly shamed, to making cashless payments in stores. The actions see advantages for individual and collective safety, sustainability, and convenience, but also register forms of behaviour and attitudes with predictive capacities. This gives rise to suspicions about a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour over time. Returning to Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 135), the impact of this finds a dissociation of power from the individual, whereby they become unwittingly impelled into pre-existing social structures, leading to a ‘normalisation’ and acceptance of such systems. If we are talking about the dark, anxiety is key for a Ministry of SOS. Following Foucault again (Subject and Power, 326-7), there is the potential for a crawling, creeping governance that was once distinct but is itself increasingly hidden and growing. A blanket call for some form of ongoing scrutiny of such proliferating powers might be warranted, but with it comes regulation that, while offering certain rights and protections, is not without consequences. For their part, a number of SOS platforms had little to no moderation for explicit content prior to December 2018, and in terms of power, notwithstanding important anxiety connected to arguments that children and the vulnerable need protections from those that would seek to take advantage, this was a crucial aspect of community building and self-expression that resulted in this freedom of expression. In unearthing the extent that individuals are empowered arising from the capacity to post sexual self-images, Tiidenberg ("Bringing Sexy Back") considered that through dark SOS (read here as unregulated) some users could work in opposition to the mainstream consumer culture that provides select and limited representations of bodies and their sexualities. This links directly to Mondin’s exploration of the abundance of queer and feminist pornography on dark SOS as a “counterpolitics of visibility” (288). This work resulted in a reasoned claim that the technological structure of dark SOS created a highly political and affective social space that users valued. What also needs to be underscored is that many users also believed that such a space could not be replicated on other mainstream SOS because of the differences in architecture and social norms. Cho (47) worked with this theory to claim that dark SOS are modern-day examples in a history of queer individuals having to rely on “underground economies of expression and relation”. Discussions such as these complicate what dark SOS might now become in the face of ‘adult’ content moderation and emerging tracking technologies to close sites or locate individuals that transgress social norms. Further, broader questions are raised about how content moderation fits in with the public space conceptualisations of SOS more generally. Increasingly, “there is an app for that” where being able to identify the poster of an image or an author of an unknown text is seen as crucial. While there is presently no standard approach, models for combining instance-based and profile-based features such as SVM for determining authorship attribution are in development, with the result that potentially far less content will remain hidden in the future (Bacciu et al.). 4. There’s Nothing New under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For some, “[the] high hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded” (Schwarzenegger, 99). My participant observation over some years in various SOS, however, finds that critical concern has always existed. Views move along the spectrum of thinking from deep scepticisms (Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil) to wondrous techo-utopian promises (Negroponte, Being Digital). Indeed, concerns about the (then) new technologies of wireless broadcasting can be compared with today’s anxiety over the possible effects of the internet and SOS. Inglis (7) recalls, here, too, were fears that humanity was tampering with some dangerous force; might wireless wave be causing thunderstorms, droughts, floods? Sterility or strokes? Such anxieties soon evaporated; but a sense of mystery might stay longer with evangelists for broadcasting than with a laity who soon took wireless for granted and settled down to enjoy the products of a process they need not understand. As the analogy above makes clear, just as audiences came to use ‘the wireless’ and later the internet regularly, it is reasonable to argue that dark SOS will also gain widespread understanding and find greater acceptance. Dark social spaces are simply the recent development of internet connectivity and communication more broadly. The dark SOS afford choice to be connected beyond mainstream offerings, which some users avoid for their perceived manipulation of content and user both. As part of the wider array of dark web services, the resilience of dark social spaces is reinforced by the proliferation of users as opposed to decentralised replication. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used for anonymity in parallel to TOR access, but they guarantee only anonymity to the client. A VPN cannot guarantee anonymity to the server or the internet service provider (ISP). While users may use pseudonyms rather than actual names as seen on Facebook and other SOS, users continue to take to the virtual spaces they inhabit their off-line, ‘real’ foibles, problems, and idiosyncrasies (Chenault). To varying degrees, however, people also take their best intentions to their interactions in the dark. The hyper-efficient tools now deployed can intensify this, which is the great advantage attracting some users. In balance, however, in regard to online information access and dissemination, critical examination of what is in the public’s interest, and whether content should be regulated or controlled versus allowing a free flow of information where users self-regulate their online behaviour, is fraught. O’Loughlin (604) was one of the first to claim that there will be voluntary loss through negative liberty or freedom from (freedom from unwanted information or influence) and an increase in positive liberty or freedom to (freedom to read or say anything); hence, freedom from surveillance and interference is a kind of negative liberty, consistent with both libertarianism and liberalism. Conclusion The early adopters of initial iterations of SOS were hopeful and liberal (utopian) in their beliefs about universality and ‘free’ spaces of open communication between like-minded others. This was a way of virtual networking using a visual motivation (led by images, text, and sounds) for consequent interaction with others (Cinque, Visual Networking). The structural transformation of the public sphere in a Habermasian sense—and now found in SOS and their darker, hidden or closed social spaces that might ensure a counterbalance to the power of those with influence—towards all having equal access to platforms for presenting their views, and doing so respectfully, is as ever problematised. Broadly, this is no more so, however, than for mainstream SOS or for communicating in the world. References Bacciu, Andrea, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Eugenio Nerio Nemmi, Valerio Neri, and Julinda Stefa. “Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution Combining Instance Based and Profile-Based Features.” CLEF (Working Notes). Lugano, Switzerland, 9-12 Sep. 2019. Bentham, Jeremy, and Miran Božovič. The Panopticon Writings. London: Verso Trade, 1995. 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Introduction This article is concerned with the recent rise in popularity of crypto art, the term given to digital artworks whose ownership and provenance are confirmed with a non-fungible token (NFT), making it possible to sell these works within decentralised cryptocurrency art markets. The goal of this analysis is to trace a genealogy of crypto art to Dada, an avant-garde movement that originated in the early twentieth century. My claim is that Dadaism in crypto art appears in its exhausted form that is a result of its revival in the 1950s and 1960s by the Neo Dada that reached the current age through Pop Art. Dada’s anti-art project of rejecting beauty and aesthetics has transformed into commercial success in the Neo Dada Pop Art movement. In turn, Pop Art produced its crypto version that explores not only the question of what art is and is not, but also when art becomes money. In what follows, I will provide a brief overview of NFT art and its three categories that could generally be found within crypto marketplaces: native crypto art, non-digital art, and digital distributed-creativity art. Throughout, I will foreground the presence of Dadaism in these artworks and provide art historical context. NFTs: Brief Overview A major technological component that made NFTs possible was developed in 1991, when cryptographers Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta proposed a method for time-stamping data contained in digital documents shared within a distributed network of users (99). This work laid the foundation for what became known as blockchain and was further implemented in the development of Bitcoin, a digital currency invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The original non-fungible tokens, Coloured Coins, were created in 2012. By “colouring” or differentiating bitcoins, Coloured Coins were assigned special properties and had a value independent of the underlying Bitcoin, allowing their use as commodity certificates, alternative currencies, and other financial instruments (Assia et al.). In 2014, fuelled by a motivation to protect digital artists from unsanctioned distribution of their work while also enabling digital art sales, media artist Kevin McCoy and tech entrepreneur Anil Dash saw the potential of blockchain to satisfy their goals and developed what became to be known as NFTs. This overnight invention was a result of McCoy and Dash’s participation in the Seven on Seven annual New York City event, a one-day creative collaboration that challenged seven pairs of artists and engineers to “make something” (Rhizome). McCoy and Dash did not patent their invention, nor were they able to popularise it, mentally archiving it as a “footnote in internet history”. Ironically, just a couple of years later NFTs exploded into a billion-dollar market, living up to an ironic name of “monetized graphics” that the pair gave to their invention. Crypto art became an international sensation in March 2021, when a digital artist Mike Winklemann, known as Beeple, sold his digital collage titled Everydays: The First 5000 Days for US$69.3 million, prompting Noah Davis, a curator who assisted with the sale at the Christie’s auction house, to proclaim: “he showed us this collage, and that was my eureka moment when I knew this was going to be extremely important. It was just so monumental and so indicative of what NFTs can do” (Kastrenakes). As a technology, a non-fungible token can create digital scarcity in an otherwise infinitely replicable digital space. Contrary to fungible tokens, which are easily interchangeable due to having an equal value, non-fungible tokens represent unique items for which one cannot find an equivalent. That is why we rely on the fungibility of money to exchange non-fungible unique goods, such as art. Employing non-fungible tokens allows owning and exchanging digital items outside of the context in which they originated. Now, one can prove one’s possession of a digital skin from a videogame, for example, and sell it on digital markets using crypto currency (“Bible”). Behind the technology of NFTs lies the use of a cryptographic hash function, which converts a digital artwork of any file size into a fixed-length hash, called message digest (Dooley 179). It is impossible to revert the process and arrive at the original image, a quality of non-reversibility that makes the hash function a perfect tool for creating a digital representation of an artwork proofed from data tampering. The issued or minted NFT enters a blockchain, a distributed database that too relies on cryptographic properties to guarantee fidelity and security of data stored. Once the NFT becomes a part of the blockchain, its transaction history is permanently recorded and publicly available. Thus, the NFT simultaneously serves as a unique representation of the artwork and a digital proof of ownership. NFTs are traded in digital marketplaces, such as SuperRare, KnownOrigin, OpenSea, and Rarible, which rely on a blockchain to sustain their operations. An analysis of these markets’ inventory can be summarised by the following list of roughly grouped types of artistic works available for purchase: native crypto art, non-digital art, distributed creativity art. Native Crypto Art In this category, I include projects that motivated the creation of NFT protocols. Among these projects are the aforementioned Colored Coins, created in 2012. These were followed by issuing other visual creations native to the crypto-world, such as LarvaLabs’s CryptoPunks, a series of 10,000 algorithmically generated 8-bit-style pixelated digital avatars originally available for free to anyone with an Ethereum blockchain account, gaining a cult status among the collectors when they became rare sought-after items. On 13 February 2022, CryptoPunk #5822 was sold for roughly $24 million in Ethereum, beating the previous record for such an NFT, CryptoPunk #3100, sold for $7.58 million. CryptoPunks laid the foundation for other collectible personal profile projects, such Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cool Cats. One of the ultimate collections of crypto art that demonstrates the exhaustion of original Dada motivations is titled Monas, an NFT project made up of 5,000 programmatically generated versions of a pixelated Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1503-1506). Each Monas, according to the creators, is “a mix of Art, history, and references from iconic NFTs” (“Monas”). Monas are a potpourri of meme and pop culture, infused with inside jokes and utmost silliness. Monas invariably bring to mind the historic Dadaist gesture of challenging bourgeois tastes through defacing iconic art historical works, such as Marcel Duchamp’s treatment of Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. In 1919, Duchamp drew a moustache and a goatee on a reproduction of La Joconde, as the French called the painting, and inscribed “L.H.O.O.Q.” that when pronounced sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul”, a vulgar expression indicating sexual arousal of the subject. At the time of its creation, this Dada act was met with the utmost public contempt, as Mona Lisa was considered a sacred work of art and a patron of the arts, an almost religious symbol (Elger and Grosenick 82). Needless to say, the effect of Monas on public consciousness is far from causing disgust and, on the contrary, brings childish joy and giggles. As an NFT artist, Mankind, explains in his YouTube video on personal profile projects: “PFPs are built around what people enjoy. People enjoy memes, people enjoy status, people enjoy being a part of something bigger than themselves, the basic primary desire to mix digital with social and belong to a community”. Somehow, “being bigger than themselves” has come to involve collecting defaced images of Mona Lisa. Turning our attention to historical analysis will help trace this transformation of the Dada insult into a collectible NFT object. Dada and Its Legacy in Crypto Art Dada was founded in 1916 in Zurich, by Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, and other artists who fled their homelands during the First World War (Hapgood and Rittner 63). One of Dada’s primary aspirations was to challenge the dominance of reason that brought about the tragedy of the First World War through attacking the postulates of culture this form of reason produced. Already in 1921, such artists as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Max Ernst were becoming exhausted by Dada’s nihilist tendencies and rejection of all programmes for the arts, except for the one that called for the total freedom of expression. The movement was pronounced dead about May 1921, leaving no sense of regret since, in the words of Breton, “its omnipotence and its tyranny had made it intolerable” (205). An important event associated with Dada’s revival and the birth of the Neo Dada movement was the publication of The Dada Painters and Poets in 1951. This volume, the first collection of Dada writings in English and the most comprehensive anthology in any language, was introduced to the young artists at the New School by John Cage, who revived Tristan Tzara’s concept that “life is far more interesting” than art (Hapgood and Rittner 64). The 1950s were marked by a renewed interest in Dadaism that can also be evidenced in galleries and museums organising numerous exhibitions on the movement, such as Dada 1916 –1923 curated by Marcel Duchamp at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953. By the end of the decade, such artists as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg began exploring materials and techniques that can be attributed to Dadaism, which prompted the title of Neo Dada to describe this thematic return (Hapgood and Rittner 64). Among the artistic approaches that Neo Dada borrowed from Dada are Duchampian readymades that question the status of the art object, Kurt Schwitters’s collage technique of incorporating often banal scraps and pieces of the everyday, and the use of chance operations as a compositional device (Hapgood and Rittner 63–64). These approaches comprise the toolbox of crypto artists as well. Monas, CryptoPunks, and Bored Ape Yacht Club are digital collages made of scraps of pop culture and the everyday Internet life assembled into compositional configurations through chance operation made possible by the application of algorithmic generation of the images in each series. Art historian Helen Molesworth sees the strategies of montage, the readymade, and chance not only as “mechanisms for making art objects” but also as “abdications of traditional forms of artistic labor” (178). Molesworth argues that Duchamp’s invention of the readymade “substituted the act of (artistic) production with consumption” and “profoundly questioned the role, stability, nature, and necessity of the artist’s labor” (179). Together with questioning the need for artistic labour, Neo Dadaists inherited what an American art historian Jack D. Flam terms the “anything goes” attitude: Dada’s liberating destruction of rules and derision of art historical canon allowed anything and everything to be considered art (xii). The “anything goes” approach can also be traced to the contemporary crypto artists, such as Beeple, whose Everydays: The First 5000 Days was a result of assembling into a collage the first 5,000 of his daily training sketches created while teaching himself new digital tools (Kastrenakes). When asked whether he genuinely liked any of his images, Beeple explained that most digital art was created by teams of people working over the course of days or even weeks. When he “is pooping something out in 45 minutes”, it “is probably not gonna look that great comparatively” (Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg). At the core of Dada was a spirit of absurdism that drove an attack on the social, political, artistic, and philosophical norms, constituting a radical movement against the Establishment (Flam xii). In Dada Art and Anti-Art, Hans Richter’s personal historical account of the Dada movement, the artist describes the basic principle of Dada as guided by a motivation “to outrage public opinion” (66). Richter’s writings also point out a desensitisation towards Dada provocations that the public experienced as a result of Dada’s repetitive assaults, demanding an invention of new methods to disgrace the public taste. Richter recounts: our exhibitions were not enough. Not everyone in Zurich came to look at our pictures, attending our meetings, read our poems and manifestos. The devising and raising of public hell was an essential function of any Dada movement, whether its goal was pro-art, non-art or anti-art. And the public (like insects or bacteria) had developed immunity to one of kind poison, we had to think of another. (66) Richter’s account paints a cultural environment in which new artistic provocations mutate into accepted norms in a quick succession, forming a public body that is immune to anti-art “poisons”. In the foreword to Dada Painters and Poets, Flam outlines a trajectory of acceptance and subjugation of the Dadaist spirit by the subsequent revival of the movement’s core values in the Neo Dada of the 1950s and 1960s. When Dadaism was rediscovered by the writers and artists in the 1950s, the Dada spirit characterised by absurdist irony, self-parody, and deadpan realism was becoming a part of everyday life, as if art entered life and transformed it in its own image. The Neo Dada artists, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, existed in a culturally pluralistic space where the project of a rejection of the Establishment was quickly absorbed into the mainstream, mutating into the high culture it was supposedly criticising and bringing commercial success of which the original Dada artists would have been deeply ashamed (Flam xiii). Raoul Hausmann states: “Dada fell like a raindrop from heaven. The Neo-Dadaists have learnt to imitate the fall, but not the raindrop” (as quoted in Craft 129). With a similar sentiment, Richard Huelsenbeck writes: “Neo-Dada has turned the weapons used by Dada, and later by Surrealism, into popular ploughshares with which to till the fertile soil of sensation-hungry galleries eager for business” (as quoted in Craft 130). Marcel Duchamp, the forefather of the avant-garde, comments on the loss of Dada’s original intent: this Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty. (Flam xiii) In Neo Dada, the original anti-art impulse of Dadaism was converted into its opposite, becoming an artistic stance and a form of aesthetics. Flam notes that these gradual transformations resulted in the shifts in public consciousness, which it was becoming more difficult to insult. Artists, among them Roy Lichtenstein, complained that it was becoming impossible to make anything despicable: even a dirty rug could be admired (Flam xiii). The audience lost their ability to understand when they were being mocked, attacked, or challenged. Writing in 1981, Flam proclaimed that “Dada spirit has become an inescapable condition of modern life” (xiv). I contend that the current crypto art thrives on the Dada spirit of absurdism, irony, and self-parody and continues to question the border between art and non-art, while fully subscribing to the “anything goes” approach. In the current iteration of Dada in the crypto world, the original subversive narrative can be mostly found in the liberating rhetoric promoted by the proponents of the decentralised economic system. While Neo Dada understood the futility of shocking the public and questioning their tastes, crypto art is ignorant of the original Dada as a form of outrage, a revolutionary movement ignited by a social passion. In crypto art, the ambiguous relationship that Pop Art, one of the Neo Dada movements, had with commercial success is transformed into the content of the artworks. As Tristan Tzara laconically explained, the Dada project was to “assassinate beauty” and with it all the infrastructure of the art market (as quoted in Danto 39). Ironically, crypto artists, the descendants of Dada, erected the monument to Value artificially created through scarcity made possible by blockchain technology in place of the denigrated Venus demolished by the Dadaists. After all, it is the astronomical prices for crypto art that are lauded the most. If in the pre-NFT age, artistic works were evaluated based on their creative merit that included considering the prominence of the artist within art historical canon, current crypto art is evaluated based on its rareness, to which the titles of the crypto art markets SuperRare and Rarible unambiguously refer (Finucane 28–29). In crypto art, the anti-art and anti-commercialism of Dada has fully transformed into its opposite. Another evidence for considering crypto art to be a descendant of Dada is the NFT artists’ concern for the question of what art is and is not, brought to the table by the original Dada artists. This concern is expressed in the manifesto-like mission statement of the first Museum of Crypto Art: at its core, the Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△) challenges, creates conflict, provokes. M○C△ puts forward a broad representation of perspectives meant to upend our sense of who we are. It poses two questions: “what is art?” and “who decides?” We aim to resolve these questions through a multi-stakeholder decentralized platform of art curation and exhibition. (The Museum of Crypto Art) In the past, the question regarding the definition of art was overtaken by the proponent of the institutional approach to art definition, George Dickie, who besides excluding aesthetics from playing a part in differentiating art from non-art famously pronounced that an artwork created by a monkey is art if it is displayed in an art institution, and non-art if it is displayed elsewhere (Dickie 256). This development might explain why decentralisation of the art market achieved through the use of blockchain technology still relies on the endorsing of the art being sold by the widely acclaimed art auction houses: with their stamp of approval, the work is christened as legitimate art, resulting in astronomical sales. Non-Digital Art It is not surprising that an NFT marketplace is an inviting arena for the investigation of questions of commercialisation tackled in the works of Neo Dada Pop artists, who made their names in the traditional art world. This brings us to a discussion of the second type of artworks found in NFT marketplaces: non-digital art sold as NFT and created by trained visual artists, such as Damien Hirst. In his recent NFT project titled Currency, Hirst explores “the boundaries of art and currency—when art changes and becomes a currency, and when currency becomes art” (“The Currency”). The project consists of 10,000 artworks on A4 paper covered in small, coloured dots, a continuation of the so-called “spot-paintings” series that Hirst and his assistants have been producing since the 1980s. Each artwork is painted on a hand-made paper that bears the watermark of the artist’s bust, adorned with a microdot that serves as a unique identification, and is made to look very similar to the others—visual devices used to highlight the ambiguous state of these artworks that simultaneously function as Hirst-issued currency. For Hirst, this project is an experiment: after the purchase of NFTs, buyers are given an opportunity to exchange the NFT for the original art, safely stored in a UK vault; the unexchanged artworks will be burned. Is art going to fully transform into currency? Will you save it? In Hirst’s project, the transformation of physical art into crypto value becomes the ultimate act of Dada nihilism, except for one big difference: if Dada wanted to destroy art as a way to invent it anew, Hirst destroys art to affirm its death and dissolution in currency. In an ironic gesture, the gif NFT artist Nino Arteiro, as if in agreement with Hirst, attempts to sell his work titled Art Is Not Synonymous of Profit, which contains a crudely written text “ART ≠ PROFIT!” for 0.13 Ether or US$350. Buying this art will negate its own statement and affirm its analogy with money. Distributed-Creativity Art When browsing through crypto art advertised in the crypto markets, one inevitably encounters works that stand out in their emphasis on aesthetic and formal qualities. More often than not, these works are created with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). To a viewer bombarded with creations unconcerned with the concept of beauty, these AI works may serve as a sensory aesthetic refuge. Among the most prominent artists working in this realm is Refik Anadol, whose Synthetic Dreams series at a first glance may appear as carefully composed works of a landscape painter. However, at a closer look nodal connections between points in rendered space provide a hint at the use of algorithmic processes. These attractive landscapes are quantum AI data paintings created from a data set consisting of 200 million raw images of landscapes from around the world, with each image having been computed with a unique quantum bit string (“Synthetic Dreams”). Upon further contemplation, Anadol’s work begins to remind of the sublime Romantic landscapes, revamped through the application of AI that turned fascination with nature’s unboundedness into awe in the face of the unfathomable amounts of data used in creation of Anadol’s works. These creations can be seen as a reaction against the crypto art I call exhausted Dada, or a marketing approach that targets a different audience. In either case, Anadol revives aesthetic concern and aligns himself with the history of sublimity in art that dates back to the writings of Longinus, becoming of prime importance in the nineteenth-century Romantic painting, and finding new expressions in what is considered the technological sublime, which, according to David E. Nye. concentrates “on the triumph of machines… over space and time” (as quoted in Butler et al. 8). In relation to his Nature Dreams project, Anadol writes: “the exhibition’s eponymous, sublime AI Data Sculpture, Nature Dreams utilizes over 300 million publicly available photographs of nature collected between 2018- 2021 at Refik Anadol Studio” (“Machine Hallucinations Nature Dreams”). From this short description it is evident that Anadol’s primary focus is on the sublimity of large sets of data. There is an issue with that approach: since experiencing the sublime involves loss of rational thinking (Longinus 1.4), these artworks cease the viewer’s ability to interrogate cultural adaptation of AI technology and stay within the realm of decorative ornamentations, demanding an intervention akin to that brought about by the historical avant-garde. Conclusions I hope that this brief analysis demonstrates the mechanisms by which the strains of Dada entered the vocabulary of crypto artists. It is probably also noticeable that I equate the nihilist project of the exhausted Dada found in such works as Hirst’s Cryptocurrency with a dead end similar to so many other dead ends in art history—one only needs to remember that the death of painting was announced a myriad of times, and yet it is still alive. Each announcement of its death was followed by its radiant return. It could be that using art as a visual package for monetary value, a death statement to art’s capacity to affect human lives, will ignite artists to affirm art’s power to challenge, inspire, and enrich. References Assia, Yoni et al. “Colored Coins Whitepaper.” 2012-13. <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AnkP_cVZTCMLIzw4DvsW6M8Q2JC0lIzrTLuoWu2z1BE/edit>. Breton, André. “Three Dada Manifestoes, before 1924.” The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Ed. Robert Motherwell, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1989. 197–206. Butler, Rebecca P., and Benjamin J. Butler. “Examples of the American Technological Sublime.” TechTrends 57.1 (2013): 9–10. Craft, Catherine Anne. Constellations of Past and Present: (Neo-) Dada, the Avant- Garde, and the New York Art World, 1951-1965. 1996. PhD dissertation. University of Texas at Austin. Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, Kasia. “Creativity Is Hustle: Make Something Every Day.” The Atlantic, 7 Oct. 2011. 12 July 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2011/10/creativity-is-hustle-make-something-every-day/246377/#slide15>. Danto, Arthur Coleman. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago, Ill: Open Court, 2006. Dash, Anil. “NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End like This.” The Atlantic, 2 Apr. 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/>. Dickie, George. “Defining Art.” American Philosophical Quarterly 6.3 (1969): 253–256. Dooley, John F. History of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis: Codes, Ciphers, and Their Algorithms. Cham: Springer, 2018. Elder, R. Bruce. Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier UP, 2015. Elger, Dietmar, and Uta Grosenick. Dadaism. Köln: Taschen, 2004. Flam, Jack. “Foreword”. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Motherwell. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1989. xi–xiv. Finucane, B.P. Creating with Blockchain Technology: The ‘Provably Rare’ Possibilities of Crypto Art. 2018. Master’s thesis. University of British Columbia. Haber, Stuart, and W. Scott Stornetta. “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document.” Journal of Cryptology 3.2 (1991): 99–111. Hapgood, Susan, and Jennifer Rittner. “Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958-1962.” Performing Arts Journal 17.1 (1995): 63–70. Kastrenakes, Jacob. “Beeple Sold an NFT for $69 million: Through a First-of-Its-Kind Auction at Christie’s.” The Verge, 11 Mar. 2021. 14 July 2021 <https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million>. Longinus. On the Sublime. Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellen, 1987. Mankind, “What Are PFP NFTs”. YouTube. 2 Feb. 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drh_fAV4XNM>. “Machine Hallucinations.” Refik Anadol. 20 Jan. 2022 <https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucination/>. “Machine Hallucinations Nature Dreams.” Refik Anadol. 18 Apr. 2022 <https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucinations-nature-dreams/>. Molesworth, Helen. “From Dada to Neo-Dada and Back Again.” October 105 (2003): 177–181. “Monas”. OpenSea. 17 Feb. 2022 <https://opensea.io/collection/monas>. Museum of Crypto Art. 23 Jan. 2022 <https://museumofcryptoart.com/>. Nakamoto, Satoshi. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” 2008. <https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016. Rhizome. “Seven on Seven 2019.” rhizome.org, 26 Mar. 2019. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://rhizome.org/editorial/2019/mar/26/announcing-seven-on-seven-2019-participants-details/>. “Synthetic Dreams.” OpenSea. 23 Jan. 2022 <https://opensea.io/collection/synthetic-dreams>. “The Currency.” OpenSea. 15 Feb. 2022 <https://opensea.io/collection/thecurrency>. “The Non-Fungible Token Bible: Everything You Need to Know about NFTs.” OpenSea Blog, 10 Jan. 2020. 10 June 2021 <https://blog.opensea.io/guides/non-fungible-tokens/>.

“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies Popular music is firmly rooted within realist practice, or what has been called the "culture of authenticity" associated with modernism. As Lawrence Grossberg notes, the accelleration of the rate of change in modern life caused, in post-war youth culture, an identity crisis or "lived contradiction" that gave rock (particularly) and popular music (generally) a peculiar position in regard to notions of authenticity. Grossberg places rock's authenticity within the "difference" it maintains from other cultural forms, and notes that its difference "can be justified aesthetically or ideologically, or in terms of the social position of the audiences, or by the economics of its production, or through the measure of its popularity or the statement of its politics" (205-6). Popular music scholars have not adequately addressed issues of authenticity and individuality. Two of the most important questions to be asked are: How is authenticity communicated in popular music? What is the site of the interpretation of authenticity? It is important to ask about sound, technology, about the attempt to understand the ideal and the image, the natural and artificial. It is these that make clear the strongest connections between popular music and contemporary culture. Popular music is a particularly appropriate site for the study of authenticity as a cultural category, for several reasons. For one thing, other media do not follow us, as aural media do, into malls, elevators, cars, planes. Nor do they wait for us, as a tape player paused and ready to play. What is important is not that music is "everywhere" but, to borrow from Vivian Sobchack, that it creates a "here" that can be transported anywhere. In fact, we are able to walk around enveloped by a personal aural environment, thanks to a Sony Walkman.1 Also, it is more difficult to shut out the aural than the visual. Closing one's ears does not entirely shut out sound. There is, additionally, the sense that sound and music are interpreted from within, that is, that they resonate through and within the body, and as such engage with one's self in a fashion that coincides with Charles Taylor's claim that the "ideal of authenticity" is an inner-directed one. It must be noted that authenticity is not, however, communicated only via music, but via text and image. Grossberg noted the "primacy of sound" in rock music, and the important link between music, visual image, and authenticity: Visual style as conceived in rock culture is usually the stage for an outrageous and self-conscious inauthenticity... . It was here -- in its visual presentation -- that rock often most explicitly manifested both an ironic resistance to the dominant culture and its sympathies with the business of entertainment ... . The demand for live performance has always expressed the desire for the visual mark (and proof) of authenticity. (208) But that relationship can also be reversed: Music and sound serve in some instances to provide the aural mark and proof of authenticity. Consider, for instance, the "tear" in the voice that Jensen identifies in Hank Williams's singing, and in that of Patsy Cline. For the latter, voicing, in this sense, was particularly important, as it meant more than a singing style, it also involved matters of self-identity, as Jensen appropriately associates with the move of country music from "hometown" to "uptown" (101). Cline's move toward a more "uptown" style involved her visual image, too. At a significant turning point in her career, Faron Young noted, Cline "left that country girl look in those western outfits behind and opted for a slicker appearance in dresses and high fashion gowns" (Jensen 101). Popular music has forged a link with visual media, and in some sense music itself has become more visual (though not necessarily less aural) the more it has engaged with industrial processes in the entertainment industry. For example, engagement with music videos and film soundtracks has made music a part of the larger convergence of mass media forms. Alongside that convergence, the use of music in visual media has come to serve as adjunct to visual symbolisation. One only need observe the increasingly commercial uses to which music is put (as in advertising, film soundtracks and music videos) to note ways in which music serves image. In the literature from a variety of disciplines, including communication, art and music, it has been argued that music videos are the visualisation of music. But in many respects the opposite is true. Music videos are the auralisation of the visual. Music serves many of the same purposes as sound does generally in visual media. One can find a strong argument for the use of sound as supplement to visual media in Silverman's and Altman's work. For Silverman, sound in cinema has largely been overlooked (pun intended) in favor of the visual image, but sound is a more effective (and perhaps necessary) element for willful suspension of disbelief. One may see this as well in the development of Dolby Surround Sound, and in increased emphasis on sound engineering among video and computer game makers, as well as the development of sub-woofers and high-fidelity speakers as computer peripherals. Another way that sound has become more closely associated with the visual is through the ongoing evolution of marketing demands within the popular music industry that increasingly rely on visual media and force image to the front. Internet technologies, particularly the WorldWideWeb (WWW), are also evidence of a merging of the visual and aural (see Hayward). The development of low-cost desktop video equipment and WWW publishing, CD-i, CD-ROM, DVD, and other technologies, has meant that visual images continue to form part of the industrial routine of the music business. The decrease in cost of many of these technologies has also led to the adoption of such routines among individual musicians, small/independent labels, and producers seeking to mimic the resources of major labels (a practice that has become considerably easier via the Internet, as it is difficult to determine capital resources solely from a WWW site). Yet there is another facet to the evolution of the link between the aural and visual. Sound has become more visual by way of its representation during its production (a representation, and process, that has largely been ignored in popular music studies). That representation has to do with the digitisation of sound, and the subsequent transformation sound and music can undergo after being digitised and portrayed on a computer screen. Once digitised, sound can be made visual in any number of ways, through traditional methods like music notation, through representation as audio waveform, by way of MIDI notation, bit streams, or through representation as shapes and colors (as in recent software applications particularly for children, like Making Music by Morton Subotnick). The impetus for these representations comes from the desire for increased control over sound (see Jones, Rock Formation) and such control seems most easily accomplished by way of computers and their concomitant visual technologies (monitors, printers). To make computers useful tools for sound recording it is necessary to employ some form of visual representation for the aural, and the flexibility of modern computers allows for new modes of predominately visual representation. Each of these connections between the aural and visual is in turn related to technology, for as audio technology develops within the entertainment industry it makes sense for synergistic development to occur with visual media technologies. Yet popular music scholars routinely analyse aural and visual media in isolation from one another. The challenge for popular music studies and music philosophy posed by visual media technologies, that they must attend to spatiality and context (both visual and aural), has not been taken up. Until such time as it is, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to engage issues of authenticity, because they will remain rootless instead of situated within the experience of music as fully sensual (in some cases even synaesthetic). Most of the traditional judgments of authenticity among music critics and many popular music scholars involve space and time, the former in terms of the movement of music across cultures and the latter in terms of history. None rely on notions of the "situatedness" of the listener or musicmaker in a particular aural, visual and historical space. Part of the reason for the lack of such an understanding arises from the very means by which popular music is created. We have become accustomed to understanding music as manipulation of sound, and so far as most modern music production is concerned such manipulation occurs as much visually as aurally, by cutting, pasting and otherwise altering audio waveforms on a computer screen. Musicians no more record music than they record fingering; they engage in sound recording. And recording engineers and producers rely less and less on sound and more on sight to determine whether a recording conforms to the demands of digital reproduction.2 Sound, particularly when joined with the visual, becomes a means to build and manipulate the environment, virtual and non-virtual (see Jones, "Sound"). Sound & Music As we construct space through sound, both in terms of audio production (e.g., the use of reverberation devices in recording studios) and in terms of everyday life (e.g., perception of aural stimuli, whether by ear or vibration in the body, from points surrounding us), we centre it within experience. Sound combines the psychological and physiological. Audio engineer George Massenburg noted that in film theaters: You couldn't utilise the full 360-degree sound space for music because there was an "exit sign" phenomena [sic]. If you had a lot of audio going on in the back, people would have a natural inclination to turn around and stare at the back of the room. (Massenburg 79-80) However, he went on to say, beyond observations of such reactions to multichannel sound technology, "we don't know very much". Research in psychoacoustics being used to develop virtual audio systems relies on such reactions and on a notion of human hardwiring for stimulus response (see Jones, "Sense"). But a major stumbling block toward the development of those systems is that none are able to account for individual listeners' perceptions. It is therefore important to consider the individual along with the social dimension in discussions of sound and music. For instance, the term "sound" is deployed in popular music to signify several things, all of which have to do with music or musical performance, but none of which is music. So, for instance, musical groups or performers can have a "sound", but it is distinguishable from what notes they play. Entire music scenes can have "sounds", but the music within such scenes is clearly distinct and differentiated. For the study of popular music this is a significant but often overlooked dimension. As Grossberg argues, "the authenticity of rock was measured by its sound" (207). Visually, he says, popular music is suspect and often inauthentic (sometimes purposefully so), and it is grounded in the aural. Similarly in country music Jensen notes that the "Nashville Sound" continually evoked conflicting definitions among fans and musicians, but that: The music itself was the arena in and through which claims about the Nashville Sound's authenticity were played out. A certain sound (steel guitar, with fiddle) was deemed "hard" or "pure" country, in spite of its own commercial history. (84) One should, therefore, attend to the interpretive acts associated with sound and its meaning. But why has not popular music studies engaged in systematic analysis of sound at the level of the individual as well as the social? As John Shepherd put it, "little cultural theoretical work in music is concerned with music's sounds" ("Value" 174). Why should this be a cause for concern? First, because Shepherd claims that sound is not "meaningful" in the traditional sense. Second, because it leads us to re-examine the question long set to the side in popular music studies: What is music? The structural homology, the connection between meaning and social formation, is a foundation upon which the concept of authenticity in popular music stands. Yet the ability to label a particular piece of music "good" shifts from moment to moment, and place to place. Frith understates the problem when he writes that "it is difficult ... to say how musical texts mean or represent something, and it is difficult to isolate structures of musical creation or control" (56). Shepherd attempts to overcome this difficulty by emphasising that: Music is a social medium in sound. What [this] means ... is that the sounds of music provide constantly moving and complex matrices of sounds in which individuals may invest their own meanings ... [however] while the matrices of sounds which seemingly constitute an individual "piece" of music can accommodate a range of meanings, and thereby allow for negotiability of meaning, they cannot accommodate all possible meanings. (Shepherd, "Art") It must be acknowledged that authenticity is constructed, and that in itself is an argument against the most common way to think of authenticity. If authenticity implies something about the "pure" state of an object or symbol then surely such a state is connected to some "objective" rendering, one not possible according to Shepherd's claims. In some sense, then, authenticity is autonomous, its materialisation springs not from any necessary connection to sound, image, text, but from individual acts of interpretation, typically within what in literary criticism has come to be known as "interpretive communities". It is not hard to illustrate the point by generalising and observing that rock's notion of authenticity is captured in terms of songwriting, but that songwriters are typically identified with places (e.g. Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Liverpool, etc.). In this way there is an obvious connection between authenticity and authorship (see Jones, "Popular Music Studies") and geography (as well in terms of musical "scenes", e.g. the "Philly Sound", the "Sun Sound", etc.). The important thing to note is the resultant connection between the symbolic and the physical worlds rooted (pun intended) in geography. As Redhead & Street put it: The idea of "roots" refers to a number of aspects of the musical process. There is the audience in which the musician's career is rooted ... . Another notion of roots refers to music. Here the idea is that the sounds and the style of the music should continue to resemble the source from which it sprang ... . The issue ... can be detected in the argument of those who raise doubts about the use of musical high-technology by African artists. A final version of roots applies to the artist's sociological origins. (180) It is important, consequently, to note that new technologies, particularly ones associated with the distribution of music, are of increasing importance in regulating the tension between alienation and progress mentioned earlier, as they are technologies not simply of musical production and consumption, but of geography. That the tension they mediate is most readily apparent in legal skirmishes during an unsettled era for copyright law (see Brown) should not distract scholars from understanding their cultural significance. These technologies are, on the one hand, "liberating" (see Hayward, Young, and Marsh) insofar as they permit greater geographical "reach" and thus greater marketing opportunities (see Fromartz), but on the other hand they permit less commercial control, insofar as they permit digitised music to freely circulate without restriction or compensation, to the chagrin of copyright enthusiasts. They also create opportunities for musical collaboration (see Hayward) between performers in different zones of time and space, on a scale unmatched since the development of multitracking enabled the layering of sound. Most importantly, these technologies open spaces for the construction of authenticity that have hitherto been unavailable, particularly across distances that have largely separated cultures and fan communities (see Paul). The technologies of Internetworking provide yet another way to make connections between authenticity, music and sound. Community and locality (as Redhead & Street, as well as others like Sara Cohen and Ruth Finnegan, note) are the elements used by audience and artist alike to understand the authenticity of a performer or performance. The lived experience of an artist, in a particular nexus of time and space, is to be somehow communicated via music and interpreted "properly" by an audience. But technologies of Internetworking permit the construction of alternative spaces, times and identities. In no small way that has also been the situation with the mediation of music via most recordings. They are constructed with a sense of space, consumed within particular spaces, at particular times, in individual, most often private, settings. What the network technologies have wrought is a networked audience for music that is linked globally but rooted in the local. To put it another way, the range of possibilities when it comes to interpretive communities has widened, but the experience of music has not significantly shifted, that is, the listener experiences music individually, and locally. Musical activity, whether it is defined as cultural or commercial practice, is neither flat nor autonomous. It is marked by ever-changing tastes (hence not flat) but within an interpretive structure (via "interpretive communities"). Musical activity must be understood within the nexus of the complex relations between technical, commercial and cultural processes. As Jensen put it in her analysis of Patsy Cline's career: Those who write about culture production can treat it as a mechanical process, a strategic construction of material within technical or institutional systems, logical, rational, and calculated. But Patsy Cline's recording career shows, among other things, how this commodity production view must be linked to an understanding of culture as meaning something -- as defining, connecting, expressing, mattering to those who participate with it. (101) To achieve that type of understanding will require that popular music scholars understand authenticity and music in a symbolic realm. Rather than conceiving of authenticity as a limited resource (that is, there is only so much that is "pure" that can go around), it is important to foreground its symbolic and ever-changing character. Put another way, authenticity is not used by musician or audience simply to label something as such, but rather to mean something about music that matters at that moment. Authenticity therefore does not somehow "slip away", nor does a "pure" authentic exist. Authenticity in this regard is, as Baudrillard explains concerning mechanical reproduction, "conceived according to (its) very reproducibility ... there are models from which all forms proceed according to modulated differences" (56). Popular music scholars must carefully assess the affective dimensions of fans, musicians, and also record company executives, recording producers, and so on, to be sensitive to the deeply rooted construction of authenticity and authentic experience throughout musical processes. Only then will there emerge an understanding of the structures of feeling that are central to the experience of music. Footnotes For analyses of the Walkman's role in social settings and popular music consumption see du Gay; Hosokawa; and Chen. It has been thus since the advent of disc recording, when engineers would watch a record's grooves through a microscope lens as it was being cut to ensure grooves would not cross over one into another. References Altman, Rick. "Television/Sound." Studies in Entertainment. Ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 39-54. Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Death and Exchange. London: Sage, 1993. Brown, Ronald. Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1995. Chen, Shing-Ling. "Electronic Narcissism: College Students' Experiences of Walkman Listening." Annual meeting of the International Communication Association. Washington, D.C. 1993. Du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 1997. Frith, Simon. Sound Effects. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Fromartz, Steven. "Starts-ups Sell Garage Bands, Bowie on Web." Reuters newswire, 4 Dec. 1996. Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place. London: Routledge, 1992. Hayward, Philip. "Enterprise on the New Frontier." Convergence 1.2 (Winter 1995): 29-44. Hosokawa, Shuhei. "The Walkman Effect." Popular Music 4 (1984). Jensen, Joli. The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialisation and Country Music. Nashville, Vanderbilt UP, 1998. Jones, Steve. Rock Formation: Music, Technology and Mass Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. ---. "Popular Music Studies and Critical Legal Studies" Stanford Humanities Review 3.2 (Fall 1993): 77-90. ---. "A Sense of Space: Virtual Reality, Authenticity and the Aural." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10.3 (Sep. 1993), 238-52. ---. "Sound, Space & Digitisation." Media Information Australia 67 (Feb. 1993): 83-91. Marrsh, Brian. "Musicians Adopt Technology to Market Their Skills." Wall Street Journal 14 Oct. 1994: C2. Massenburg, George. "Recording the Future." EQ (Apr. 1997): 79-80. Paul, Frank. "R&B: Soul Music Fans Make Cyberspace Their Meeting Place." Reuters newswire, 11 July 1996. Redhead, Steve, and John Street. "Have I the Right? Legitimacy, Authenticity and Community in Folk's Politics." Popular Music 8.2 (1989). Shepherd, John. "Art, Culture and Interdisciplinarity." Davidson Dunston Research Lecture. Carleton University, Canada. 3 May 1992. ---. "Value and Power in Music." The Sound of Music: Meaning and Power in Culture. Eds. John Shepherd and Peter Wicke. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space. New York: Ungar, 1982. Young, Charles. "Aussie Artists Use Internet and Bootleg CDs to Protect Rights." Pro Sound News July 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Steve Jones. "Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: 'Remixing' Authenticity in Popular Music Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/remix.php>. Chicago style: Steve Jones, "Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: 'Remixing' Authenticity in Popular Music Studies," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/remix.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Steve Jones. (1999) Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: "Remixing" Authenticity in Popular Music Studies. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/remix.php> ([your date of access]).