Journal articles on the topic 'Adoptees Victoria Identification'

Fourteen styles of viticulture are defined: Astute Business Grower; Experimentalist Grower; Industry-Endorsed Early Adopter; Professional Scientific Manager; Experienced Manager; Labour-Efficient Grower; Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture Grower; Traditional Grower; Ethnic Grower; Conventional Grower; Retiree Grower; Hobby Grower; Sea-Change Grower; and Marginal Grower. The methodology to identify these farming styles included 6 focus groups in Mildura, Victoria, a face-to-face interview with 142 grape-growers in the Sunraysia region of Victoria, and qualitative interviewing with industry personnel and extension staff. Problems of social desirability response bias, the lack of self-identification by growers with styles, and literacy and other methodological issues meant that qualitative, participatory (emic) methods for identifying styles were not reliable. Following considerable immersion in the field, the researchers identified, on the basis of expert judgment (etic classification), the 14 farming styles in viticulture which they regard as a typology of ideal types. Benefits of the identification of farming styles in viticulture in terms of extension are discussed.

Background and context: Australia has one of the highest rates of bowel cancer in the world, yet if detected early more than 90% of cases can be successfully treated. The Australian government's National Bowel Cancer Screening Program (NBCSP) send a free at-home iFOBT to all eligible people aged 50-74. Current uptake of the program is low (∼40%). Increasing bowel screening is a key focus of Cancer Council Victoria's (CCV) strategic plan (2017-2021). Aim: CCV aims to increase NBCSP participation rates in the state of Victoria, Australia to 50% by 2021. Strategy/Tactics: In 2017, CCV implemented its first ever television-led bowel screening campaign. A whole-organization approach was adopted to develop, implement and evaluate the campaign. Program/Policy process: A whole-organization approach included working with CCVs behavioral researchers to understand barriers and motivating factors to screen, collaboration with the epidemiology center to identify evidence to target campaign delivery, stakeholder liaison with clinicians engaged with the organization, engagement with the organization's support services to respond to calls as a result of the campaign, working with the fundraising team to develop strategies to engage supporters, and leveraging our flagship Daffodil Day initiative with a focus on bowel cancer. Outcomes: Adopting a whole-organization approach enabled all facets of the organization to be involved in a common goal. This resulted in shared ownership of campaign deliverables, greater engagement of staff across the organization in bowel screening and the identification of innovative strategies that wouldn't have been possible had this approach not been adopted. Importantly, CCV’s campaign led to greater numbers of eligible people participating in bowel screening. What was learned: The identification of bowel screening as a CCV priority was critical for enabling cross-organizational collaboration. Taking a whole-organization approach resulted in the identification of existing programs and services to leverage the campaign, strengthening its reach and overall impact.

Background and objectivesOlder adults with cognitive impairment are vulnerable to frequent hospital admissions and emergency department presentations. The aim of this study was to use a codesign approach to develop MyCare Ageing, a programme that will train volunteers to provide psychosocial support to older people with dementia and/or delirium in hospital and at home when discharged from hospital.SettingMelbourne, Victoria, Australia.Research designThis study adopts an action research methodology. We report on two co-design workshops with keystakeholders: Workshop 1: identification of components from three existing programmes to inform the development of the MyCare Ageing program logic and, Workshop 2: identification of implementation strategies.ParticipantsThe key stakeholders and workshop participants included clinicians (geriatricians, nurses and allied health), hospital staff (volunteer coordinators and hospital executives), Baptcare staff, a consumer, researchers and implementation experts and project staff.ResultsWorkshop 1 identified the components from three existing programmes—the Volunteer Dementia and Delirium Care programme, Home-Start and MyCare for inclusion in MyCare Ageing. In workshop 2, the p implementation plan was developed taking into consideration hospital-specific processes, training and support needs of volunteers and safety and risk management processes.Discussion and conclusionThe codesign process was successfully applied to develop the MyCare Ageing programme to provide volunteer support to patients with dementia and/or delirium in hospital and their transition home. MyCare Ageing is an innovative programme that meets an identified need from hospitals and consumers to support patients with dementia and/or delirium to improve psychosocial outcomes on discharge from hospital.

We explore the logic and techniques of using the concept of “jingo” in the publishing practice of “Punch” magazine as a tool of political technologies aimed at shaping public opinion on key issues of foreign policy and electoral behavior in Britain in 1878–1879. The urgency of the problem being analyzed is due to the importance of a comprehensive understanding of the pheno-menon of jingoism as one of the significant manifestations of the political history and culture of Victorian England. The study adopted a cross-disciplinary approach, which involves politically and linguistically indirect analysis of the concept of “jingo” in the context of the political and ideological realities of British history during the Eastern crisis of the 1870s of the 19th century. Specific examples show that the peculiarities of the genre of the magazine, its popularity, consideration of the cultural request of its audience determined the choice of language means, the style of presentation of the material and the choice of images. It is justified that the methods used in the texts of Punch were aimed at maintaining a positive image of the liberals and discrediting opponents both at the personal level and the party. It is concluded that the concept of “jingo” in the propaganda campaign of “Punch” has taken meaning propaganda cliches, which acted as a means of political identification, social and political advertising and anti-advertising, served as a tool to manipulate public opinion. This study may provide material for a number of further studies in the study of British political culture.

As a species, humans depend heavily on their visual sense, make decisions as much from their hearts as from their heads (emotion-and value-based decisions versus analytical, logic- and knowledge-based decisions), and dislike environmental and other change. Societies in early stages of development have generally revered old people for their wisdom and experience, whereas many societies at more advanced stages of development have adopted a culture of youth. Attitudes toward forests have shown a similar trend. Respect for large and old trees was a feature of some early societies, whereas societies in and after the industrial revolution became more interested in younger, faster growing trees for technical and utilitarian reasons. However, as human population growth caused the area of unmanaged forest, old forest, and forests of large trees to decline, reverence has revived for large, old trees and for old forests. This trend has not been matched by a renewed respect for scientific knowledge about forests and for wisdom about forests based on long experience. Reflecting the pervasive effects of the culture of youth, issues in forestry, including the issue of old forests, are being judged largely on an aesthetic basis, on human emotional response to snapshot visual aspects, and on a dislike for change—the Peter Pan syndrome. "Old-growth" forest, whatever it is, has been deified as a symbol of the mythical "balance of nature," a concept discredited by ecologists as a Victorian anachronism. There are important spiritual, aesthetic, wildlife, and environmental values associated with old forests, and the area of such forests is declining. There are many valid reasons (social, scientific, and environmental) for sustaining significant and representative areas of such forests. However, conservation of such forests and ensuring a future supply of the values they provide will not be achieved unless the reverential respect for such forests is matched by another meaning of respect: understanding such forests and basing our relationship with them on that understanding. This paper challenges forest managers and forest scientists to gain a significant understanding of "old growth" to provide a logical, knowledge-based, and experience-based foundation for the identification, inventory, conservation, and management of this forest ecosystem condition, and to assert this understanding as a counterbalance to the necessary, but insufficient, value-based attitude toward old forests that arises largely from visual snapshots and the emotions they arouse. Key words: old growth, biodiversity, sustainability, stability, succession, stand dynamics, respect for nature

The advent of the first special antiquity law was preceded by a long stage of studying and organizing knowledge about historical and cultural monuments. The Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 18 August 1882 was the first of its kind by an Act of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Act lists the first 68 monuments or sites that have been protected by law. The text of Act consists of 11 paragraphs. The analysis of paragraphs 2, 3 and 11 gives us the opportunity to formulate the very concept of a «monument» contained therein, as well as to consider the types of ancient monuments that are distinguished by law. The Ancient Monuments are: houses, buildings and other structures located on the surface of the earth or underground, as well as caves and zones of archaeological sites and location of such houses, buildings and other structures, as well as caves and zones of archaeological sites. All the constituent elements and structures of the monument are considered to be its parts. The location of the monument includes not only the area of land on which it is located, but also the surrounding zones. Deliberate destruction or deterioration of protected monuments entails criminal liability in the form of imprisonment for up to one month and a fine. However, criminal and financial responsibility rests solely with outsiders. The owner of the monument is not punished for any action he may take on his property. Paragraphs of Act for the first time regulate the state registration of monuments. Such registration involves the identification of monuments, surveys and determining their value, inclusion in the list of protected, informing the owner or tenant of the monument about the inclusion of this object in the list etc. The Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882 was one of the most important results of a set of socio-political reforms in Victorian England. The brevity of the 1882 Act made it impossible to cover all the ancient monuments, which made it only partly a source of law. Currently, there is no single legislative act in the UK on the protection and use of historical and cultural monuments. After the act of 1882 by the middle of the 20th century were adopted and enforced several laws on various aspects of the protection of monuments. However, the main provisions governing this area of social relations were laid in the late nineteenth century.

Objective Off-protocol prescribing of systemic anti-cancer therapy (SACT) can lead to concerns about effectiveness of patient care. To identify variations in practice, a toolkit was developed for health services to address patient safety and the risk of sub-optimal outcomes for patients. Data sources Following significant incidents with SACT in South Australia and New South Wales, the Department of Health and Human Services, Victoria (the department) conducted an assessment of Victorian public health services to understand current practice regarding SACT protocol governance. A literature review examining SACT auditing was also undertaken to guide improvements. A department supported Chemotherapy Audit Toolkit (CAT) was created for implementation at public hospitals in Victoria. A post-implementation survey was done on uptake and issue identification. Data summary An initial assessment showed that 27% of Victorian public health services were undertaking retrospective review of SACT dosing, which was targeted for improvement. The literature review identified little guidance, however an audit of current sector practices found several audit methodologies. A process that involved audits by health services assessing their own practice was adopted. The toolkit was developed and piloted with health services. A post-implementation survey showed that 20% of services were using the toolkit, 35% were implementing the toolkit and 45% did not use the toolkit. Conclusions The VicTAG CAT has been adopted by more than half of Victorian public health services and is being used to influence prescribing. Implementation of the toolkit has been affected by resource reallocation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The CAT is available online.

BackgroundScreening and surveillance of development are integral to ensuring effective early identification and intervention strategies for children with vulnerabilities. However, not all developmental skills have reliable screening processes, such as early language ability.MethodWe describe how a set of early life factors used in a large, prospective community cohort from Australia are associated with language abilities across the preschool years, and determine if either an accumulation of risk factors or a clustering of risk factors provide a feasible approach to surveillance of language development in preschool children.ResultsThere were 1,208 children with a 7-year language outcome. The accumulation of early life factors increased the likelihood of children having low language skills at 7-years. Over a third of children with typical language skills (36.6%) had ≤ two risks and half of the children with low language (50%) had six or more risks. As the number of factors increases the risk of having low language at 7-years increases, for example, children with six or more risks had 17 times greater risk, compared to those with ≤ two risks. Data collected from 1,910 children at 8- to 12-months were used in the latent class modeling. Four profile classes (or groups) were identified. The largest group was developmentally enabled with a supportive home learning environment (56.2%, n = 1,073). The second group was vulnerable, both developmentally and in their home learning environment (31.2%, n = 596); the third group was socially disadvantaged with a vulnerable home learning environment (7.4%, n = 142); the final group featured maternal mental health problems and vulnerable child socio-emotional adjustment (5.2%, n = 99). Compared to developmentally enabled children, the risk of low language at 7-years was greater for children in the three other groups.ConclusionThe cumulative and cluster risk analyses demonstrate the potential to use developmental surveillance to identify children within the first years of life who are at risk of language difficulties. Importantly, parent-child interaction and the home learning environment emerged as a consistent cluster. We recommend they be adopted as the common focus for early intervention and universal language promotion programs.

Me? "I" am everywhere. The 'self' permeates contemporary culture. Through capitalist individualism and conservative politics, 'self' must be considered first above the needs of the group - "looking after no. 1". In therapeutic, religious and consumerist discourses of self-improvement, self-help or self-actualisation, 'self' is obscured; an entity which needs to be sought and found, changed or accommodated, an entity which one needs to become "in touch with". Within these permutations "self" carries the assumption of its own existence, as either a stable, unchanging entity or as a contextually sensitive and dynamic identity. We invited submissions on the broad subject of "self" and were overwhelmed by the range and ambition of responses tendered. As a result, the "Self" issue of M/C contains a Feature Article and three sub-sections: 1. Performances and the Public Self, 2. The Self and the Physical, and 3. Representing Selves, Consuming Selves. We are very pleased to have Michael Clyne as the feature writer for this issue. "Saving Us From Them -- The Discourse of Exclusion on Asylum Seekers" is a timely and relevant critique of the rhetoric currently being adopted by Australian political leaders and the media around asylum seekers. Clyne discusses the negative construction of asylum seekers through this public discourse, particularly focussing on various events such as the "children overboard" affair. The use of such terms as "queue jumpers" and "border protection" are examined to reveal an exclusionary and damaging discourse which both reflects and is enacted in public attitudes and ultimately political policy. The first of our sections, "Performance and the Public Self" investigates manifestations of self across film, television, theatre and writing. Sandy Carmago, in "'Mind the Gap': The Multi-Protagonist Film Genre, Soap Opera, and the Emotive Blockbuster" explores the self in American cinema, and more particularly, in "multi-protagonist" or "emotive blockbuster" films, using the example of Magnolia. Carmago argues that although these films represent very different selves to those in mainstream (single-protagonist) action blockbusters, principally via their use of multiple protagonists, ultimately "[t]he emotive blockbuster supports rather than critiques the view of the self as isolated, solipsistic, and focused on personal rather than social distress." "Performing the Self", by Deidre Heddon, surveys performances of self, focusing on performance artists. Counter to critical claims that such autobiographical performances are solipsistic, Heddon seeks to unveil why such criticisms are so commonly levelled at performances of self, using autobiographical criticism and questions of performativity to offer alternative readings. Heddon reveals the politics and complexities of self-performativity through an exploration of personas, multiple selves and self-parody. In "Modernity and the Self: Explorations of the (Non-) Self-determining Subject in South Korean TV Dramas", Angel Lin explores the cultural constructions of self/self-determining subject in popular South Korean television programmes. Lin argues that the programmes create spaces for the contestation of contemporary notions of self, particularly the conflicts between traditional culture and the influences of Western notions of self. "What is Real? Where Fact Ends and Fiction Begins in the Writing of Paul Theroux" is Andie Miller's examination of Paul Theroux's construction of truth and self within his travel writings, particularly Fresh-Air Fiend and My Secret History. Miller describes Theroux's ability to perplex his readers by mixing fact within fiction and fantasy with non-fiction, which then influences the manner in which he is described within reviews and comments on his own public self. The first section concludes with Mark Peterson's "Choosing the Wasteland: The Social Construction of Self as Viewer in the U.S.". In this piece, Peterson attempts to resolve the contradiction between the high level of television consumption in the U.S. and the criticism of television content in individual and public discourse. Peterson suggests that the term "veging out" and its associated discourse provides a window into this paradox by allowing American consumers to construct themselves as "sensible, choice-making persons" whilst also watching large amounts of television. The second section of articles, "The Self and the Physical" revisits the mind/body dichotomy which has perplexed philosophers for thousands of years. This section begins with Paula Gardner's "The Perpetually Sick Self: The Cultural Promotion and Self-Management of Mood Illness". In this article she investigates the cultural promotion of a 'script' that assumes sick moods are possible, encouraging the self-assessment of risk and self-management of dysfunctional mood. Gardner suggests that this form of self assessment has helped to create a new, adjustable subject. Continuing the theme of self health management, Nadine Henley, in her article "The Healthy vs the Empty Self: Protective vs Paradoxical Behaviour", looks at behaviours, such as smoking, and the effectiveness of health promotions based on models which falsely assume that people are motivated to protect themselves from harm. Henley uses Cushman's concept of the hungry, empty self to explain why some people are more susceptible to cravings than others. Kerry Kid brings us back to the self's sickness in "Called to Self-care, or to Efface Self? Self-interest and Self-splitting in the Diagnostic Experience of Depression". She examines one of the primary disorders of self, clinical depression. She suggests that depression is being seen more as a "a trivial, socially manageable adjunct to the human condition of being", resulting in this condition and its drug-focussed becoming normalised. Kid is interested in the dilemma of the mind/body divide and how that affects the self/diagnosis and treatment of depressive disorders. In Derek Wallace's " 'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness" the issue of the link between the physical and cerebral is again examined. Wallace succinctly links the writings of philosophers and neuroscientists on 'self', explicating the emerging view that self is "a biologically generated but illusory construction, an effect of the operation of what are called 'neural correlates of consciousness' ". Wallace supplements this view with a term he coins 'verbal correlates of consciousness' which takes into account much of the recent post-structuralist work on self. The third section of articles, "Representing Selves, Consuming Selves" traverses issues such as self-reflexivity, the socially constructed self, self-identification, consumption and photographic selves. Matt Adams, in "Ambiguity: The Reflexive Self & Alternatives" examines the attention given to reflexivity in recent theoretical accounts of contemporary selfhood, as an "increasingly central organising phenomenon in being a self." Focusing on Anthony Giddens in particular, Adams critically explores this interest in self-reflexivity. He argues that although such accounts reveal important aspects of modern self-identity, they neglect "many areas of experience relevant to the contemporary self - tradition, culture and concepts of fate, the unconscious and emotions". Adams suggests that selves are far more complex and "ambiguous" than Giddens and others suggest. Moving from contemporary selves to Victorian selves -- in "Portrait of the Self: Victorian Technologies of Identity Invention" Gabrielle Dean uses the 19th century daguerreotype to provide a captivating context for examining notions of self. Dean investigates how the photograph affects notions of self – particularly notions of authorship, objectivity, truthfulness and the public self. As Dean suggests, "[w]hat photography mummifies, distorts and murders, among other things, is the sense that the reality of the self resides in the body, the corporeal and temporal boundaries of personhood." The conception of death is irrevocably connected to questions of self. Back in the 21st century, Lelia Green begins her article "Who is Being Helped When We Help Our Self?" by revisiting the continuing dilemma of whether self-deception is possible. Green then examines the plethora of self help literature now available at most bookshops, which she links to the need to cater for "our sense of accelerating change". The final two articles in this section explore questions of self, identity and autonomy. Simone Pettigrew, in "Consumption and the Self-Concept", considers the notion of self via the self that is reflected in "consumption decisions". Pettigrew reviews the research on consumer behaviour that suggests consumer autonomy in consumption decisions. She argues that this research is "simplistic and fails to appreciate the extent to which culture influences individuals' perceptions of the desirability of different 'ways to be'; certain objects are required to communicate particular selves. In "Conflicting Concepts of Self and The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival" Ianto Ware uses the Michigan Womym's Music Festival as a context to explore the difficult socio-biological constructions of gendered selves. Ware explores the gender/identity politics inherent within notions of "collective selves" and assumptions of shared identity. In problematising the continuous creation of new social identities, Ware argues that new approaches are needed for addressing and communicating identities as fluid entities. What this collection of articles succeeds in doing is to demonstrate that the self is multitudinous and changing, along with the various stakeholders invested in these selves. Just as philosophers, social scientists, behavioural and medical scientists have been investigating the existence and significance of individual consciousness, self-perception, self-promotion and other notions of "the self" for centuries, the research included in this feature demonstrates the continuing need to do so. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Douglas, Kate and Meakins, Felicity. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Editorial.html &gt. Chicago Style Douglas, Kate and Meakins, Felicity, "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Editorial.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Douglas, Kate and Meakins, Felicity. (2002) Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Editorial.html &gt ([your date of access]).

The need to sustain and/or create a collective identity is regularly seen as one of the cultural priorities of diasporic peoples and this, in turn, depends upon the existence of a uniquely diasporic form of communication and connection with the country of origin. Today, digital media technologies provide easy information recording and retrieval, and mobile IT networks allow global accessibility and participation in the redefinition of identities. Vis-à-vis our understanding of the proximity and connectivity associated with globalisation, the role of ICTs cannot be underestimated and is clearly more than a simple instrument for the expression of a pre-existing diasporic identity. Indeed, the concept of “e-diaspora” is gaining popularity. Consequently, research into the role of ICTs in the lives of diasporic peoples contributes to a definition of the concept of diaspora, understood here as the result of the dispersal of all members of a nation in several countries. In this context, I will demonstrate how members of the Bulgarian diaspora negotiate not only their identities but also their identifications through one of the most popular community websites, Facebook. My methodology consists of the active observation of Bulgarian users belonging to the diaspora, the participation in groups and forums on Facebook, and the analysis of discourses produced online. This research was conducted for the first time between 1 August 2008 and 31 May 2009 through the largest 20 (of 195) Bulgarian groups on the French version of Facebook and 40 (of over 500) on the English one. It is important to note that the public considered to be predominantly involved in Facebook is a young audience in the age group of 18-35 years. Therefore, this article is focused on two generations of Bulgarian immigrants: mostly recent young and second-generation migrants. The observed users are therefore members of the Bulgarian diaspora who have little or no experience of communism, who don’t feel the weight of the past, and who have grown up as free and often cosmopolitan citizens. Communist hegemony in Bulgaria began on 9 September 1944, when the army and the communist militiamen deposed the country’s government and handed power over to an anti-fascist coalition. During the following decades, Bulgaria became the perfect Soviet satellite and the imposed Stalinist model led to sharp curtailing of the economic and social contacts with the free world beyond the Iron Curtain. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the communist era and the political and economic structures that supported it. Identity, Internet, and Diaspora Through the work of Mead, Todorov, and boyd it is possible to conceptualise the subject in terms of both of internal and external social identity (Mead, Todorov, boyd). In this article, I will focus, in particular, on social and national identities as expressions of the process of sharing stories, experiences, and understanding between individuals. In this respect, the phenomenon of Facebook is especially well placed to mediate between identifications which, according to Freud, facilitate the plural subjectivities and the establishment of an emotional network of mutual bonds between the individual and the group (Freud). This research also draws on Goffman who, from a sociological point of view, demystifies the representation of the Self by developing a dramaturgical theory (Goffman), whereby identity is constructed through the "roles" that people play on the social scene. Social life is a vast stage where the actors are required to adhere to certain socially acceptable rituals and guidelines. It means that we can consider the presentation of Self, or Others, as a facade or a construction of socially accepted features. Among all the ICTs, the Internet is, by far, the medium most likely to facilitate free expression of identity through a multitude of possible actions and community interactions. Personal and national memories circulate in the transnational space of the Internet and are reshaped when framed from specific circumstances such as those raised by the migration process. In an age of globalisation marked by the proliferation of population movements, instant communication, and cultural exchanges across geographic boundaries, the phenomenon of the diaspora has caught the attention of a growing number of scholars. I shall be working with Robin Cohen’s definition of diaspora which highlights the following common features: (1) dispersal from an original homeland; (2) the expansion from a homeland in search of work; (3) a collective memory and myth about the homeland; (4) an idealisation of the supposed ancestral homeland; (5) a return movement; (6) a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time; (7) a troubled relationship with host societies; (8) a sense of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries; and (9) the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in tolerant host countries (Cohen). Following on this earlier work on the ways in which diasporas give rise to new forms of subjectivity, the concept of “e-diaspora” is now rapidly gaining in popularity. The complex association between diasporic groups and ICTs has led to a concept of e-diasporas that actively utilise ICTs to achieve community-specific goals, and that have become critical for the formation and sustenance of an exilic community for migrant groups around the globe (Srinivasan and Pyati). Diaspora and the Digital Age Anderson points out two key features of the Internet: first, it is a heterogeneous electronic medium, with hardly perceptible contours, and is in a state of constant development; second, it is a repository of “imagined communities” without geographical or legal legitimacy, whose members will probably never meet (Anderson). Unlike “real” communities, where people have physical interactions, in the imagined communities, individuals do not have face-to-face communication and daily contact, but they nonetheless feel a strong emotional attachment to the nation. The Internet not only opens new opportunities to gain greater visibility and strengthen the sense of belonging to community, but it also contributes to the emergence of a transnational public sphere where the communities scattered in various locations freely exchange their views and ideas without fear of restrictions or censorship from traditional media (Appadurai, Bernal). As a result, the Web becomes a virtual diasporic space which opens up, to those who have left their country, a new means of confrontation and social participation. Within this new diasporic space, migrants are bound in their disparate geographical locations by a common vision or myth about the homeland (Karim). Thanks to the Internet, the computer has become a primary technological intermediary between virtual networks, bringing its members closer in a “global village” where everyone is immediately connected to others. Thus, today’s diasporas are not the diaspora of previous generations in that the migration is experienced and negotiated very differently: people in one country are now able to continue to participate actively in another country. In this context, the arrival of community sites has increased the capacity of users to create a network on the Internet, to rediscover lost links, and strengthen new ones. Unlike offline communities, which may weaken once their members have left the physical space, online communities that are no longer limited by the requirement of physical presence in the common space have the capacity to endure. Identity Strategies of New Generations of Bulgarian Migrants It is very difficult to quantify migration to or from Bulgaria. Existing data is not only partial and limited but, in some cases, give an inaccurate view of migration from Bulgaria (Soultanova). Informal data confirm that one million Bulgarians, around 15 per cent of Bulgaria’s entire population (7,620,238 inhabitants in 2007), are now scattered around the world (National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria). The Bulgarian migrant is caught in a system of redefinition of identity through the duration of his or her relocation. Emigrating from a country like Bulgaria implies a high number of contingencies. Bulgarians’ self-identification is relative to the inferiority complex of a poor country which has a great deal to do to catch up with its neighbours. Before the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union, the country was often associated with what have been called “Third World countries” and seen as a source of crime and social problems. Members of the Bulgarian diaspora faced daily prejudice due to the bad reputation of their country of origin, though the extent of the hostility depended upon the “host” nation (Marcheva). Geographically, Bulgaria is one of the most eastern countries in Europe, the last to enter the European Union, and its image abroad has not facilitated the integration of the Bulgarian diaspora. The differences between Bulgarian migrants and the “host society” perpetuate a sentiment of marginality that is now countered with an online appeal for national identity markers and shared experiences. Facebook: The Ultimate Social Network The Growing Popularity of Facebook With more than 500 million active members, Facebook is the most visited website in the world. In June 2007, Facebook experienced a record annual increase of 270 per cent of connections in one year (source: comScore World Metrix). More than 70 translations of the site are available to date, including the Bulgarian version. What makes it unique is that Facebook positively encourages identity games. Moreover, Facebook provides the symbolic building blocks with which to build a collective identity through shared forms of discourse and ways of thinking. People are desperate to make a good impression on the Internet: that is why they spend so much time managing their online identity. One of the most important aspects of Facebook is that it enables users to control and manage their image, leaving the choice of how their profile appears on the pages of others a matter of personal preference at any given time. Despite some limitations, we will see that Facebook offers the Bulgarian community abroad the possibility of an intense and ongoing interaction with fellow nationals, including the opportunity to assert and develop a complex new national/transnational identity. Facebook Experiences of the Bulgarian Diaspora Created in the United States in 2004 and extended to use in Europe two or three years later, Facebook was quickly adopted by members of the Bulgarian diaspora. Here, it is very important to note that, although the Internet per se has enabled Bulgarians across the globe to introduce Cyrillic script into the public arena, it is definitely Facebook that has made digital Cyrillic visible. Early in computer history, keyboards with the Cyrillic alphabet simply did not exist. Thus, Bulgarians were forced to translate their language into Latin script. Today, almost all members of the Bulgarian population who own a computer use a keyboard that combines the two alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic, and this allows alternation between the two. This is not the case for the majority of Bulgarians living abroad who are forced to use a keyboard specific to their country of residence. Thus, Bulgarians online have adopted a hybrid code to speak and communicate. Since foreign keyboards are not equipped with the same consonants and vowels that exist in the Bulgarian language, they use the Latin letters that best suit the Bulgarian phonetic. Several possible interpretations of these “encoded” texts exist which become another way for the Bulgarian migrants to distinguish and assert themselves. One of these encoded scripts is supplemented by figures. For example, the number “6” written in Bulgarian “шест” is applied to represent the Bulgarian letter “ш.” Bulgarian immigrants therefore employ very specific codes of communication that enhance the feeling of belonging to a community that shares the same language, which is often incomprehensible to others. As the ultimate social networking website, Facebook brings together Bulgarians from all over the world and offers them a space to preserve online memorials and digital archives. As a result, the Bulgarian diaspora privileges this website in order to manage the strong links between its members. Indeed, within months of coming into online existence, Facebook established itself as a powerful social phenomenon for the Bulgarian diaspora and, very soon, a virtual map of the Bulgarian diaspora was formed. It should be noted, however, that this mapping was focused on the new generation of Bulgarian migrants more familiar with the Internet and most likely to travel. By identifying the presence of online groups by country or city, I was able to locate the most active Bulgarian communities: “Bulgarians in UK” (524 members), “Bulgarians in Chicago” (436 members), “Bulgarians studying in the UK” (346 members), “Bulgarians in America” (333 members), “Bulgarians in the USA” (314 members), “Bulgarians in Montreal” (249 members), “Bulgarians in Munich” (241 members), and so on. These figures are based on the “Groups” Application of Facebook as updated in February 2010. Through those groups, a symbolic diasporic geography is imagined and communicated: the digital “border crossing,” as well as the real one, becomes a major identity resource. Thus, Bulgarian users of Facebook are connecting from the four corners of the globe in order to rebuild family links and to participate virtually in the marriages, births, and lives of their families. It sometimes seems that the whole country has an appointment on Facebook, and that all the photos and stories of Bulgarians are more or less accessible to the community in general. Among its virtual initiatives, Facebook has made available to its users an effective mobilising tool, the Causes, which is used as a virtual noticeboard for activities and ideas circulating in “real life.” The members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to adhere to different “causes” that may be local, national, or global, and that are complementary to the civic and socially responsible side of the identity they have chosen to construct online. Acting as a virtual realm in which distinct and overlapping trajectories coexist, Facebook thus enables users to articulate different stories and meanings and to foster a democratic imaginary about both the past and the future. Facebook encourages diasporas to produce new initiatives to revive or create collective memories and common values. Through photos and videos, scenes of everyday life are celebrated and manipulated as tools to reconstruct, reconcile, and display a part of the history and the identity of the migrant. By combating the feelings of disorientation, the consciousness of sharing the same national background and culture facilitates dialogue and neutralises the anxiety and loneliness of Bulgarian migrants. When cultural differences become more acute, the sense of isolation increases and this encourages migrants to look for company and solidarity online. As the number of immigrants connected and visible on Facebook gets larger, so the use of the Internet heightens their sense of a substantial collective identity. This is especially important for migrants during the early years of relocation when their sense of identity is most fragile. It can therefore be argued that, through the Internet, some Bulgarian migrants are replacing alienating face-to-face contact with virtual friends and enjoying the feeling of reassurance and belonging to a transnational community of compatriots. In this sense, Facebook is a propitious ground for the establishment of the three identity strategies defined by Herzfeld: cultural intimacy (or self-stereotypes); structural nostalgia (the evocation of a time when everything was going better); and the social poetic (the strategies aiming to retrieve a particular advantage and turn it into a permanent condition). In this way, the willingness to remain continuously in virtual contact with other Bulgarians often reveals a desire to return to the place of birth. Nostalgia and outsourcing of such sentiments help migrants to cope with feelings of frustration and disappointment. I observed that it is just after their return from summer holidays spent in Bulgaria that members of the Bulgarian diaspora are most active on the Bulgarian forums and pages on Facebook. The “return tourism” (Fourcade) during the summer or for the winter holidays seems to be a central theme in the forums on Facebook and an important source of emotional refuelling. Tensions between identities can also lead to creative formulations through Facebook’s pages. Thus, the group “You know you’re a Bulgarian when...”, which enjoys very active participation from the Bulgarian diaspora, is a space where everyone is invited to share, through a single sentence, some fact of everyday life with which all Bulgarians can identify. With humour and self-irony, this Facebook page demonstrates what is distinctive about being Bulgarian but also highlights frustration with certain prejudices and stereotypes. Frequently these profiles are characterised by seemingly “glocal” features. The same Bulgarian user could define himself as a Parisian, adhering to the group “You know you’re from Paris when...”, but also a native of a Bulgarian town (“You know you’re from Varna when...”). At the same time, he is an architect (“All architects on Facebook”), supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama, a fan of Japanese manga (“maNga”), of a French actor, an American cinema director, or Indian food. He joins a cause to save a wild beach on the Black Sea coast (“We love camping: Gradina Smokinia and Arapia”) and protests virtually against the slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands (“World shame”). One month, the individual could identify as Bulgarian, but next month he might choose to locate himself in the country in which he is now resident. Thus, Facebook creates a virtual territory without borders for the cosmopolitan subject (Negroponte) and this confirms the premise that the Internet does not lead to the convergence of cultures, but rather confirms the opportunities for diversification and pluralism through multiple social and national affiliations. Facebook must therefore be seen as an advantageous space for the representation and interpretation of identity and for performance and digital existence. Bulgarian migrants bring together elements of their offline lives in order to construct, online, entirely new composite identities. The Bulgarians we have studied as part of this research almost never use pseudonyms and do not seem to feel the need to hide their material identities. This suggests that they are mature people who value their status as migrants of Bulgarian origin and who feel confident in presenting their natal identities rather than hiding behind a false name. Starting from this material social/national identity, which is revealed through the display of surname with a Slavic consonance, members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to manage their complex virtual identities online. Conclusion Far from their homeland, beset with feelings of insecurity and alienation as well as daily experiences of social and cultural exclusion (much of it stemming from an ongoing prejudice towards citizens from ex-communist countries), it is no wonder that migrants from Bulgaria find relief in meeting up with compatriots in front of their screens. Although some migrants assume their Bulgarian identity as a mixture of different cultures and are trying to rethink and continuously negotiate their cultural practices (often through the display of contradictory feelings and identifications), others identify with an imagined community and enjoy drawing boundaries between what is “Bulgarian” and what is not. The indispensable daily visit to Facebook is clearly a means of forging an ongoing sense of belonging to the Bulgarian community scattered across the globe. Facebook makes possible the double presence of Bulgarian immigrants both here and there and facilitates the ongoing processes of identity construction that depend, more and more, upon new media. In this respect, the role that Facebook plays in the life of the Bulgarian diaspora may be seen as a facet of an increasingly dynamic transnational world in which interactive media may be seen to contribute creatively to the formation of collective identities and the deformation of monolithic cultures. References Anderson, Benedict. L’Imaginaire National: Réflexions sur l’Origine et l’Essor du Nationalisme. Paris: La Découverte, 1983. Appadurai, Ajun. Après le Colonialisme: Les Conséquences Culturelles de la Globalisation. Paris: Payot, 2001. Bernal, Victoria. “Diaspora, Cyberspace and Political Imagination: The Eritrean Diaspora Online.” Global Network 6 (2006): 161-79. boyd, danah. “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?” Knowledge Tree (May 2007). Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: University College London Press. 1997. Goffman, Erving. La Présentation de Soi. Paris: Editions de Minuit, Collection Le Sens Commun, 1973. Fourcade, Marie-Blanche. “De l’Arménie au Québec: Itinéraires de Souvenirs Touristiques.” Ethnologies 27.1 (2005): 245-76. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychologie des Foules et Analyses du Moi.” Essais de Psychanalyse. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2001 (1921). Herzfeld, Michael. Intimité Culturelle. Presse de l’Université de Laval, 2008. Karim, Karim-Haiderali. The Media of Diaspora. Oxford: Routledge, 2003. Marcheva, Marta. “Bulgarian Diaspora and the Media Treatment of Bulgaria in the French, Italian and North American Press (1992–2007).” Unpublished PhD dissertation. Paris: University Panthéon – Assas Paris 2, 2010. Mead, George Herbert. L’Esprit, le Soi et la Société. Paris: PUF, 2006. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Vintage, 2005. Soultanova, Ralitza. “Les Migrations Multiples de la Population Bulgare.” Actes du Dolloque «La France et les Migrants des Balkans: Un État des Lieux.” Paris: Courrier des Balkans, 2005. Srinivasan, Ramesh, and Ajit Pyati. “Diasporic Information Environments: Reframing Immigrant-Focused Information Research.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58.12 (2007): 1734-44. Todorov, Tzvetan. Nous et les Autres: La Réflexion Française sur la Diversité Humaine. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

Introduction For migrants, the dream of a better life is often expressed by the metaphor of the journey (Papastergiadis 31). Propelled by a variety of forces and choices, migrant life narratives tend to revolve around movement from one place to another, from a homeland associated with cultural and spiritual origins to a hostland which offers new opportunities and possibilities. In many cases, however, their dreams of migrants are deferred; migrants endure hardships and make sacrifices in the hope of a better life for their children. Many studies have explored the social and economic outcomes of the “second” generation – the children of migrants born and raised in the new country. In Australia studies have found, despite some notable exceptions (Betts and Healy; Inglis), that the children of migrants have achieved the economic and social integration their parents dreamed of (Khoo, McDonald, Giorgas, and Birrell). At the same time, however, research has found that the second generation face new challenges, including the negative impact of ethnic and racial discrimination (Dunn, Blair, Bliuc, and Kamp; Jakubowicz, Collins, Reid, and Chafic), the experience of split identities and loyalties (Butcher and Thomas) and a complicated sense of “home” and belonging (Fabiansson; Mason; Collins and Read). In this articles, we explore what the dream of a better life means for second generation migrants, and how that dream might reshape Australia’s multicultural identity. A focus on this generation’s imaginings, visions and hopes for the future is important, we argue, because its distinctive experience, differing from that of other sections of the Australian community in some important ways, needs to be recognised as the nation’s multicultural identity is refashioned in changing circumstances. Unlike their parents, the second generation was born into what is now one of the most diverse countries in the world, with over a quarter (26%) of the population born overseas and a further 23% having at least one parent born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics). Unlike their parents, they have come of age in the era of digitally-enabled international communication that has transformed the ways in which people connect. This cohort has a distinctive relationship to the national imaginary. The idea of “multicultural Australia” that was part of the country’s adoption of a multicultural policy framework in the early 1970s was based on a narrative of “old” (white Anglo) Australians “welcoming” (or “tolerating”) “new” (immigrant) Australians (Ang and Stratton; Hage). In this narrative, the second generation, who are Australian born but not “old” Australians and of “migrant background” but not “new” Australians, are largely invisible, setting them apart from both their migrant parents and other, overseas born young Australians of diverse backgrounds, with whom they are often grouped (Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson; Ang, Brand, Noble, and Sternberg; Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson; Harris).In what follows, we aim to contribute to calls for a rethinking of Australian national identity and “culture of interaction” to better reflect the experiences of all citizens (Levey; Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson) by focusing on the experiences of the second generation. Taking our cue from Geoffrey Levey, we argue that “it is not the business of government or politicians to complete the definition of what it means to be Australian” and that we should instead look to a sense of national identity that emerges organically from “mundane daily social interaction” (Levey). To this end, we adopt an “everyday multiculturalism” perspective (Wise and Velayutham), “view[ing] situations of co-existence ... as a concrete, specific context of action, in which difference comes across as a constraint ... and as a resource” (Semi, Colombo, Comozzi, and Frisina 67). We see our focus on the second generation as complementary to existing studies that have examined experiences of young Australians of diverse backgrounds through an everyday multiculturalism prism without distinguishing between newly arrived young people and those born in Australia (Ang, Brand, Noble, and Sternberg; Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson; Harris). We emphasise, however, after Mansouri and Johns, that the second generation’s distinctive cultural and socio-structural challenges and needs – including their distinctive relationship to the idea of “multicultural Australia” – deserve special attention. Like Christina Schachtner, we are cognisant that “faced with the task of giving meaning and direction to their lives, the next generation is increasingly confronted with a need to reconsider the revered values of the present and the past and to reorientate themselves while establishing new meanings” (233; emphasis ours). Like her, we recognise that in the contemporary era, young adults often use digital communicative spaces for the purpose of giving meaning to their lives in the circumstances in which they find themselves (Schachtner 233). Above all, we concur with Hopkins and Dolic when they state that “understanding the processes that inform the creation and maintenance of ... ethnic minority and Australian mainstream identities amongst second-generation young people is critical if these young people are to feel included and recognised, whilst avoiding the alienation and social exclusion that has had such ugly results in other parts of the world (153).In part one, we draw on initial findings from a collaborative empirical study between Swinburne University and the Victorian Multicultural Commission to outline some of the paradoxes and contradictions encountered by a particular – well-educated (currently or recently enrolled at university) and creative (seeking jobs in the media and cultural industries) – segment of the second generation in their attempts to imagine themselves within the frame of “multicultural Australia” (3 focus groups, of 60-90 minutes duration, involving 7-10 participants were conducted over 2018 and 2019). These include feeling more Australian than their parents while not always being seen as “really” Australian by the broader community; embracing diversity but struggling to find a language in which to adequately express it; and acknowledging the progress being made in representing diversity in the mainstream media while not seeing their stories and those of their parents represented there.In part two, we outline future research directions that look to a range of cultural texts and mediated forms of social interactions across popular culture and media in search of new conversations about personal and national identity that could feed into a renewal of a more inclusive understanding of Australian identity.Living and Talking DiversityOur conversations with second generation young Australians confirmed many of the paradoxes and contradictions experienced by young people of diverse backgrounds in the constant traversing of their parents’ and Australian culture captured in previous research (Ang, Brand, Noble, and Sternberg; Harris). Emblematic of these paradoxes are the complicated ways they relate to “Australian identity,” notably expressed in the tension felt between identifying as “Australian” when overseas and with their parent’s heritage when in Australia. An omnipresent reminder of their provisional status as “Aussies” is questions such as “well I know you’re Australian but what are you really?” As one participant put it: “I identify as Australian, I’m proud of my Australian identity. But in Australia I’m Turkish and that’s just because when someone asks I’m not gonna say ‘oh I’m Australian’ ... I used to live in the UK and if someone asked me there, I was Australian. If someone asks me here, I’m Turkish. So that’s how it is. Turkish, born in Australia”The second generation young people in our study responded to these ambiguities in different ways. Some applied hyphenated labels to themselves, while others felt that identification with the nation was largely irrelevant, documented in existing research (Collins, Reid, and Fabiansson; Harris). As one of our participants put it, “I just personally don’t find national identity to be that important or relevant – it’s just another detail about me – I [don’t] think it should affect anything else.” The study also found that our participants had difficulty in finding specific terms to express their identities. For some, trying to describe their identities was “really confusing,” and their thinking changed from day to day. For others, the reason it was hard to express their identities was that the very substance of mundane, daily life “feels very default”. This was the case when many of our participants reported their lived experiences of diversity, whether related to culinary and sport experiences, or simply social interactions with “the people I talk to” and daily train trips where “everyone [of different ethnicities] just rides the train together and doesn’t think twice about it”. As one young person put it, “the default is going around the corner for dinner and having Mongolian beef and pho”. We found that a factor feeding into the ambivalence of articulating Australian identity is the influence – constraining and enabling – of prevailing idioms of identity and difference. Several instances were uncovered in which widely circulating and highly politicised discourses of identity had the effect of shutting down conversation. In particular, the issue of what was “politically correct” language was a touchstone for much of the discussion among the young people in our study. This concern with “appropriate language” created some hesitancy and confusion, as when one person was trying to describe white Australians: “obviously you know Australia’s still a – how do you, you know, I guess I don’t know how to – the appropriate, you know PC language but Australia’s a white country if that makes sense you know”. Other participants were reluctant to talk about cultural groups and their shared characteristics at all, seeing such statements as potentially racist. In contrast to this feeling of restricted discourse, we found many examples of our participants playing and repurposing received vocabularies. As reported in other research, the young people used ideas about origin, race and ethnicity in loose and shifting ways (Back; Butcher). In some cases, in contrast to fears of “racist” connotations of identifying individuals by their cultural background, the language of labels and shorthand descriptors was used as a lingua franca for playful, albeit not unproblematic, negotiations across cultural boundaries. One participant reported being called one of “The Turks” in classes at university. His response expressed the tensions embedded in this usage, finding it stereotyping but ultimately affectionate. As he expressed it, “it’s like, ‘I have a personality, guys.’ But that was okay, it was endearing, they were all with it”. Another finding highlighted more fraught issues that can be raised when existing identity categories are transposed from contexts strongly marked by historically specific circumstances into unrelated contexts. This was the case of a university classmate saying of another Turkish participant that he “was the black guy of the class because … [he] was the darkest”. The circulation of “borrowed” discourses – particularly, as in this case, from the USA – is notable in the digital era, and the broader implications of such usage among people who are not always aware of the connotations of a discourse that is deeply rooted in a particular history and culture, are yet to be fully examined (Lester). The study also shed some light on the struggles the young people in our study encountered in finding a language in which to describe their identities and relationship to “Australianness”. When asked if they thought others would consider them to be “Australian”, responses revealed a spectrum ranging from perceived rejection to an ill-defined and provisional inclusion. One person reported – despite having been born and lived in Australia all their life – that “I don’t think I would ever be called Australian from Australian people – from white Australian people”. Another thought that it was not possible to generalise about being considered Australians by the broader community, as “some do, some don’t”. Again, responses varied. While for some it was a source of unease, for others the distancing from “Australianness” was not experienced negatively, as in the case of the participant who said of being singled out as “different” from the Anglo-Celtic mainstream, “I actually don’t mind that … I’ve got something that a lot of white Australians males don’t have”.A connected finding was the continuing presence of, often subtle but clearly registered, racism. The second generation young people in the study were very conscious of the ways in which experiences of racism they encountered differed from – and represented an improvement on – that of their parents. Drawing an intergenerational contrast between the explicit racism their parents were often subjected to and their own experiences of what they frequently referred to as microaggressions, they mostly saw progress occurring on this front. Another sign of progress they observed was in relation to their own propensity to reject exclusionary thinking, as when they suggested that their parents’ generation are more likely to make “assumptions about culture” based on people’s “outward appearance” which they found problematic because “everyone’s everywhere”. While those cultural faux pas were judged as “well-meaning” and even justified by not “growing up in a culturally diverse setting”, they are at odds with young people’s own experiences and understanding of diversity.The final major finding to emerge from the study was the widespread view that mainstream media fails to represent their lives. Again, our participants acknowledged the progress that has been made over recent decades and applauded moves towards greater representation of non-Anglo-Celtic communities in mainstream free-to-air programming. But the vast majority reported that their experiences are not represented. The sentiment that “I’d love to see someone who looks like me on TV more – on a really basic level – I’d like to see someone who looks like my Dad” was shared by many. What remained missing – and motivated many of the young people in our study to embark on filmmaking careers – was content that reflected their local, place-based lifestyles and the intergenerational dynamics of migrated families that is the fabric of their lives. When asked if Australian media content reflected their experience, one participant put it bluntly: “if I felt like it did, I wouldn’t be actively trying to make documentaries and films about it”.Dreaming DiversityThe findings of the study confirmed earlier research highlighting the ambiguities encountered by second generation Australians who are demographically, emotionally and culturally marked by their parents’ experiences of migration even as they forge their post-migration futures. On the one hand, they reported an allegiance to the Australian nation and recognised that in many ways that they are more part of its fabric than their parents. On the other hand, they reported a number of situations in which they feel marginalised and not “really” Australian, as when they are asked “where are you really from” and when they do not see their stories represented in the mainstream media. In particular, the study highlighted the tensions involved in describing personal and Australian identity, revealing the struggle the second generation often experience in their attempts to express the complexity of their identifications and sense of belonging. As we see it, the lack of recognition of being “really” Australian felt by the young people in our study and their view that mainstream media does not sufficiently represent their experience are connected. Underlying both is a status quo in which the normative Australian is Anglo-Celtic. To help shift this prevailing view of the normative Australian, we endorse earlier calls for a research program centred on analyses of a range of cultural texts and mediated forms of social interactions in search of new conversations about Australian identity. Media, both public and commercial, have the potential to be key agents for community building and identity formation. From radio and television programs through to online discussion forums and social media, media have provided platforms for creating collective imagination and a sense of belonging, including in the context of migration in Australia (Sinclair and Cunningham; Johns; Ang, Brand, Noble, and Sternberg). By supplying symbolic resources through which cultural differences and identities are represented and circulated, they can offer up opportunities for societal reflection, scrutiny and self-interpretation. As a starting point, for example, three current popular media formats that depict or are produced by second-generation Australians lend themselves to such a multi-sited analysis. The first is internet forums in which second generation young people share their quotidian experiences of “bouncing between both cultures in our lives” (Wu and Yuan), often in humorous forms. As the popularity of Subtle Asian Traits and its offshoot Subtle Curry Traits have indicated, these sites tap into the hunger among the Asian diaspora for increased media visibility. The second is the work of comedians, including those who self-identify as of migrant descent. The politics of stereotyping and racial jokes and the difference between them has been a subject of considerable research, including into television comedy productions which are important because of their potential audience reach and ensuing post-viewing conversations (Zambon). The third is a new generation of television programs which are set in situations of diversity without being heralded as “about” diversity. A key case is the television drama series The Heights, first screened on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia in 2019, which explores the relationships between the residents of a social housing tower and the people who live in the rapidly gentrifying community that surrounds it in the melting pot of urban Australia. These examples represent a diverse range of cultural expressions – created informally and spontaneously (Subtle Asian Traits, Subtle Curry Traits), fashioned by individuals working in the entertainment industry (comedians), and produced professionally and broadcast on national TV networks (The Heights). What unites them is an engagement with the novel forms of belonging that postwar migration has produced (Papastergiadis 20) and an attempt to communicate and represent the lived experience of contemporary Australian diversity, including negotiated dreams and aspirations for the future. We propose a systematic analysis of the new languages of identity and difference that their efforts to represent the evolving patterns and circumstances of diversity in Australia are bringing forth. Conclusions To dream in the context of migration implies, more often than not, the prospect of a better material life in an adopted country. Instead, through the notion of “dreaming diversity”, we foreground the dreams, expectations and imaginations for the future of the Australian second generation which centre on carving out their cultural place in the nation.The empirical research we presented paints a picture of the second generation's paradoxical and contradictory experiences as they navigate the shifting landscape of Australia’s multicultural society. It gives a glimpse of the challenges and hopes they encounter as well as the direction of their attempts to negotiate their place within “Australian identity”. Finally, it highlights the need for a more expansive conversation and language in which that identity can be expressed. A language in which to talk – not just about the many cultures that make up the nation, but also to each other from within them – will be crucial to facilitate the deeper intercultural understanding and engagement many young people aspire to. Our ambition is not to codify a register of approved terms, and even less to formulate a new official discourse for use in multicultural policy documents. It is rather to register, crystalise and expand a discussion around difference and identity that is emerging from everyday interactions of Australians and foster a more committed conversation attuned to contemporary realities and communicative spaces where those interactions take place. In search of a richer vocabulary in which Australian identity might be reimagined, we have identified a research program that will explore emerging ways of talking about difference and identity across a range of cultural and media formats about or by the second generation. While arguing for the significance of the languages and idioms that are emerging in the spaces that young people inhabit, we recognise that, no less than other demographics, second-generation Australians are influenced by circulating narratives and categories in which (national) identity is discussed (Harris 15), including official conceptions and prevailing discourses of identity politics which are often encountered online and through popular culture. Our point is that the dreams, visions and imaginaries of second generation Australians, who will be among the key actors in fashioning Australia’s multicultural futures, are an important element of reimagining Australia’s multiculturalism even if those discourses may be partial, ambivalent or fragmented. We see this research program as building on and extending the tradition of sociological and cultural analyses of popular culture, media and cultural diversity and contributing to a more robust and systematic catalogue of multicultural narratives across different popular formats, genres, and production arrangements characteristic of the diversified media landscape. 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DOI: 10.1177/0163443716663640.AcknowledgmentsThe empirical data reported here was drawn from Zooming In: Multiculturalism through the Lens of the Next Generation, a research collaboration between Swinburne University and the Victorian Multicultural Commission exploring contemporary perspectives on diversity among young Australians through their filmmaking practice, led by Chief Investigators Dr Glenda Ballantyne (Department of Social Sciences) and Dr Vincent Giarusso (Department of Film and Animation). We wish to thank Liam Wright and Alexa Scarlata for their work as Research Assistants on this project, and particularly the participants who shared their stories. Special thanks also to the editors of this special issue and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on an earlier version of this article. FundingZooming In: Multiculturalism through the Lens of the Next Generation has been generously supported by the Victorian Multicultural Commission, which we gratefully acknowledge.

Introduction This article aims to explore some of the ideological discourses that reinforce marriage as a central social and cultural institution in US-American society. Andrew Cherlin argues that despite social secularisation, rising divorce rates and the emergence of other, alternative forms of love and living, marriage “remains the most highly valued form of family life in American culture, the most prestigious way to live your life” (9). Indeed, marriage in the US has become an ideological and political battlefield, with charged debates about who is entitled to this form of state-sanctioned relationship, with the government spending large sums of money to promote the value of marriage and the highest number of people projected to get married (nearly 90 per cent of all people) compared to other Western nations (Cherlin 4). I argue here that the idea of marriage as the ideal form for an intimate relationship permeates US-American culture to an extent that we can speak of a marital hegemony. This hegemony is fuelled by and reflected in the saturation of American popular culture with celebratory depictions of the white wedding as public performance and symbolic manifestation of the values associated with marriage. These depictions contribute to the discursive production of weddings as “one of the major events that signal readiness and prepare heterosexuals for membership in marriage as an organizing practice for the institution of marriage” (Ingraham 4). From the representation of weddings as cinematic climax in a huge number of films, to TV shows such as The Bachelor, Bridezillas and Race to the Altar, to the advertisement industry and the bridal magazines that construct the figure of the bride as an ideal that every girl and woman should aspire to, popular discourses promote the desirability of marriage in a wide range of media spheres. These representations, which I call bridal fictions, do not only shape and regulate the production of gendered, raced, classed and sexual identities in the media in fundamental ways. They also promote the idea that marriage is the only adequate framework for an intimate relationship and for the constitution of an acceptable gendered identity, meanwhile reproducing heterosexuality as norm and monogamy as societal duty. Thus I argue that we can understand contemporary bridal fictions as a symbolic legitimation of marital hegemony that perpetuates the idea that “lifelong marriage is a moral imperative” (Coontz 292). Marital Hegemony By drawing on Gramsci’s term and argument of cultural hegemony, I propose that public, political, religious and popular discourses work together in intersecting, overlapping, ideologically motivated and often even contradictory ways to produce what can be conceptualised as marital hegemony. Gramsci understands the relationship between state coercion and legitimation as crucial to an understanding of constituted consensus and co-operation. By legitimation Gramsci refers to processes through which social elites constitute their leadership through the universalizing of their own class-based self-interests. These self-interests are adopted by the greater majority of people, who apprehend them as natural or universal standards of value (common sense). This ‘hegemony’ neutralizes dissent, instilling the values, beliefs and cultural meanings into the generalized social structures. (Lewis 76-77)Marital hegemony also consists of those two mechanisms, coercion and legitimation. Coercion by the social elites, in this case by the state, is conducted through intervening in the private life of citizens in order to regulate and control their intimate relationships. Through the offering of financial benefits, medical insurance, tax cuts and various other privileges to married partners only (see Ingraham 175-76), the state withholds these benefits from all those that do not conform to this kind of state-sanctioned relationship. However, this must serve as the topic of another discussion, as this paper is more interested in the second aspect of hegemony, the symbolic legitimation. Symbolic legitimation works through the depiction of the white wedding as the occasion on which entering the institution of marriage is publicly celebrated and marital identity is socially validated. Bridal fictions work on a semiotic and symbolic level to display and perpetuate the idea of marriage as the most desirable and ultimately only legitimate form of intimate, heterosexual relationships. This is not to say that there is no resistance to this form of hegemony, as Foucault argues, eventually there is no “power without resistances” (142). However, as Engstrom contends, contemporary bridal fictions “reinforce and endorse the idea that romantic relationships should and must lead to marriage, which requires public display—the wedding” (3). Thus I argue that we can understand contemporary bridal fictions as one key symbolic factor in the production of marital hegemony. The ongoing centrality of marriage as an institution finds its reflection, as Otnes and Pleck argue, in the fact that the white wedding, in spite of all changes and processes of liberalisation in regard to gender, family and sexuality, “remains the most significant ritual in contemporary culture” (5). Accordingly, popular culture, reflective as well as constitutive of existing cultural paradigms, is saturated with what I have termed here bridal fictions. Bridal representations have been subject to rigorous academic investigation (c.f. Currie, Geller, Bambacas, Boden, Otnes and Pleck, Wallace and Howard). But, by using the term “bridal fictions”, I seek to underscore the fictional nature of these apparent “representations”, emphasising their role in producing pervasive utopias, rather than representing reality. This is not to say that bridal fictions are solely fictive. In fact, my argument here is that these bridal fictions do have discursive influence on contemporary wedding culture and practices. With my analysis of a bridal advertisement campaign later on in this paper, I aim to show exemplarily how bridal fictions work not only in perpetuating marriage, monogamy and heteronormativity as central organizing principles of intimate life. But moreover, how bridal fictions use this framework to promote certain kinds of white, heterosexual, upper-class identities that normatively inform our understanding of who is seen as entitled to this form of state-sanctioned relationship. Furthermore my aim is to highlight the role of postfeminist frames in sustaining marital hegemony. Second Wave feminism, seeing marriage as a form of “intimate colonization” (in Finlay and Clarke 416), has always been one of the few sources of critique in regard to this institution. In contrast, postfeminist accounts, now informing a significant amount of contemporary bridal fictions, evoke marriage as actively chosen, unproblematic and innately desired state of being for women. By constructing the liberated, self-determined figure of the postfeminist bride, contemporary bridal fictions naturalise and re-modernise marriage as framework for the constitution of modern feminine identity. An analysis of postfeminist bridal identities, as done in the following, is thus vital to my argument, because it highlights how postfeminist accounts deflect feminism’s critique of marriage as patriarchal, political and hegemonic institution and hence contribute to the perpetuation and production of marital hegemony. The Postfeminist Bride Postfeminism has emerged since the early 1990s as the dominant mode of constructing femininities in the media. Angela McRobbie understands postfeminism as “to refer to an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s come to be undermined”, while simultaneously appearing to be “a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism” (“Postfeminism” 255). Based on the assumption that women nowadays are no longer subjected to patriarchal power structures anymore, postfeminism actively takes feminism into account while, at the same time, “undoing” it (McRobbie “Postfeminism” 255). In contemporary postfeminist culture, feminism is “decisively aged and made to seem redundant”, which allows a conscious “dis-identification” and/or “forceful non-identity” with accounts of Second Wave feminism (McRobbie Aftermath 15). This demarcation from earlier forms of feminism is particularly evident with regard to marriage and wedding discourses. Second wave feminist critics such as Betty Friedan (1973) and Carole Pateman were critical of the influence of marriage on women’s psychological, financial and sexual freedom. This generation of feminists saw marriage as a manifestation of patriarchal power, which is based on women’s total emotional and erotic loyalty and subservience (Rich 1980), as well as on “men’s domination over women, and the right of men to enjoy equal sexual access to women” (Pateman 1988 2). In contrast, contemporary postfeminism enunciates now that “equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it [feminism] is no longer needed, it is a spent force” (McRobbie “Postfeminism” 255). Instead of seeing marriage as institutionlised subjugation of women, the postfeminist generation of “educated women who have come of age in the 1990s feel that the women’s liberation movement has achieved its goals and that marriage is now an even playing field in which the two sexes operate as equal partners” (Geller 110). As McRobbie argues “feminism was anti-marriage and this can now to be shown to be great mistake” (Aftermath 20). Accordingly, postfeminist bridal fictions do not depict the bride as passive and waiting to be married, relying on conservative and patriarchal notions of hegemonic femininity, but as an active agent using the white wedding as occasion to act out choice, autonomy and power. Genz argues that a characteristic of postfemininities is that they re-negotiate femininity and feminism no longer as mutually exclusive and irreconcilable categories, but as constitutive of each other (Genz; Genz and Brabon). What I term the postfeminist bride embodies this shifted understanding of feminism and femininity. The postfeminist bride is a figure that is often celebrated in terms of individual freedom, professional success and self-determination, instead of resting on traditional notions of female domesticity and passivity. Rather than fulfilling clichés of the homemaker and traditional wife, the postfeminist bride is characterised by an emphasis on power, agency and pleasure. Characteristic of this figure, as with other postfemininities in popular culture, is a simultaneous appropriation and repudiation of feminist critique. Within postfeminist bridal culture, the performance of traditional femininity through the figure of the bride, or by identification with it, is framed in terms of individual choice, depicted as standing outside of the political and ideological struggles surrounding gender, equality, class, sexuality and race. In this way, as Engstrom argues, “bridal media’s popularity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in the United States as indicative of a postfeminist cultural environment” (18). And although the contemporary white wedding still rests on patriarchal traditions that symbolise what the Second Wave called an “intimate colonization” (such as the bride’s vow of obedience; the giving away of the bride by one male chaperone, her father, to the next, the husband; her loss of name in marriage etc.), feminist awareness of the patriarchal dimensions of marriage and the ritual of the wedding is virtually absent from contemporary bridal culture. Instead, the patriarchal customs of the white wedding are now actively embraced by the women themselves in the name of tradition and choice. This reflects a prevailing characteristic of postfeminism, which is a trend towards the reclamation of conservative ideals of femininity, following the assumption that the goals of traditional feminist politics have been attained. This recuperation of traditional forms of femininity is one key characteristic of postfeminist bridal culture, as Engstrom argues: “bridal media collectively have become the epitomic example of women’s culture, a genre of popular culture that promotes, defends, and celebrates femininity” (21). Bridal fictions indeed produce traditional femininity by positioning the cultural, social and historical significance of the wedding as a necessary rite of passage for women and as the most important framework for the constitution of their (hetero)sexual, classed and gendered identities. Embodied in its ritual qualities, the white wedding symbolises the transition of women from single to belonging, from girlhood to womanhood and implicitly from childlessness to motherhood. However, instead of seeing this form of hegemonic femininity as a product of unequal, patriarchal power relations as Second Wave did, postfeminism celebrates traditional femininity in modernised versions. Embracing conservative feminine roles (e.g. that of the bride/wife) is now a matter of personal choice, individuality and freedom, characterised by awareness, knowingness and sometimes even irony (McRobbie “Postfeminism”). Nevertheless, the wedding is not only positioned as the pinnacle of a monogamous, heterosexual relationship, but also as the climax of a (female) life-story (“the happiest day of the life”). Combining feminist informed notions of power and choice, the postfeminist wedding is constructed as an event which supposedly enables women to act out those notions, while serving as a framework for gendered identity formation and self-realisation within the boundaries of an officialised and institutionalised relationship. “Modern” Brides I would like to exemplarily illustrate how postfeminism informs contemporary bridal fictions by analysing an advertising campaign of the US bridal magazine Modern Bride that paradigmatically and emblematically shows how postfeminist frames are used to construct the ‘modern’ bride. These advertisements feature American celebrities Guiliana Rancic (“host of E! News”), Daisy Fuentes (“host of Ultimate Style”) and Layla Ali, (“TV host and world champion”) stating why they qualify as a “modern bride”. Instead of drawing on notions of passive femininity, these advertisements have a distinct emphasis on power and agency. All advertisements include the women’s profession and other accomplishments. Rancic claims that she is a modern bride because: “I chased my career instead of guys.” These advertisements emphasise choice and empowerment, the key features of postfeminism, as Angela McRobbie (“Postfeminism”) and Rosalind Gill argue. Femininity, feminism and professionalism here are not framed as mutually exclusive, but are reconciled in the identity of the “modern” bride. Marriage and the white wedding are clearly bracketed in a liberal framework of individual choice, underpinned by a grammar of self-determination and individualism. Layla Ali states that she is a modern bride: “Because I refuse to let anything stand in the way of my happiness.” This not only communicates the message that happiness is intrinsically linked to marriage, but clearly resembles the figure that Sharon Boden terms the “super bride”, a role which allows women to be in control of every aspect of their wedding and “the heroic creator of her big day” while being part of a fairy-tale narrative in which they are the centre of attention (74). Agency and power are clearly visible in all of these ads. These brides are not passive victims of the male gaze, instead they are themselves gazing. In Rancic’s advertisement this is particularly evident, as she is looking directly at the viewer, where her husband, looking into another direction, remains rather face- and gazeless. This is in accord with bridal fictions in general, where husbands are often invisible, serving as bystanders or absent others, reinforcing the ideal that this is the special day of the bride and no one else. Furthermore, all of these advertisements remain within the limited visual repertoire that is common within bridal culture: young to middle-aged, heterosexual, able-bodied, conventionally attractive women. The featuring of the non-white bride Layla Ali is a rare occasion in contemporary bridal fictions. And although this can be seen as a welcomed exception, this advertisement remains eventually within the hegemonic and racial boundaries of contemporary bridal fictions. As Ingraham argues, ultimately “the white wedding in American culture is primarily a ritual by, for, and about the white middle to upper classes. Truly, the white wedding” (33). Furthermore, these advertisements illustrate another key feature of bridal culture, the “privileging of white middle- to upper-class heterosexual marriage over all other forms” (Ingraham 164). Semiotically, the discussed advertisements reflect the understanding of the white wedding as occasion to perform a certain classed identity: the luscious white dresses, the tuxedos, the jewellery and make up, etc. are all signifiers for a particular social standing. This is also emphasised by the mentioning of the prestigious jobs these brides hold, which presents a postfeminist twist on the otherwise common depictions of brides as practising hypergamy, meaning the marrying of a spouse of higher socio-economic status. But significantly, upward social mobility is usually presented as only acceptable for women, reinforcing the image of the husband as the provider. Another key feature of postfeminism, the centrality of heterosexual romance, becomes evident through Daisy Fuentes’ statement: “I’m a modern bride, because I believe that old-school values enhance a modern romance.” Having been liberated from the shackles of second wave feminism, which dismissed romance as “dope for dupes” (Greer in Pearce and Stacey 50), the postfeminist bride unapologetically embraces romance as central part of her life and relationship. Romance is here equated with traditionalism and “old school” values, thus reinforcing sexual exclusiveness, traditional gender roles and marriage as re-modernised, romantic norms. Angela McRobbie describes this “double entanglement” as a key feature of postfeminism that is comprised of “the co-existence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life […] with processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual and kinship relations” (“Postfeminism” 255–56). These advertisements illustrate quite palpably that the postfeminist bride is a complex figure. It is simultaneously progressive and conservative, fulfilling ideals of conservative femininity while actively negotiating in the complex field of personal choice, individualism and social conventions; it oscillates between power and passivity, tradition and modern womanhood, between feminism and femininity. It is precisely this contradictory nature of the postfeminist bride that makes the figure so appealing, as it allows women to participate in the fantasy world of bridal utopias while still providing possibilities to construct themselves as active and powerful agents. Conclusion While we can generally welcome the reconfiguration of brides as powerful and self-determined, we have to remain critical of the postfeminist assumption of women as “autonomous agents no longer constrained by any inequalities or power imbalances whatsoever” (Gill 153). Where marriage is assumed to be an “even playing field” as Geller argues (110), feminism is no longer needed and traditional marital femininity can be, once again, performed without guilt. In these ways postfeminism deflects feminist criticism with regard to the political dimensions of marital femininity and thus contributes to the production of marital hegemony. But why is marital hegemony per se problematic? Firstly, by presenting marital identity as essential for the construction of gendered identity, bridal fictions leave little room for (female) self-definition outside of the single/married binary. As Ingraham argues, not only “are these categories presented as significant indices of social identity, they are offered as the only options, implying that the organization of identity in relation to marriage is universal and in no need of explanation” (17). Hence, by positioning marriage and singledom as opposite poles on the axis of proper femininity, bridal fictions stigmatise single women as selfish, narcissistic, hedonistic, immature and unable to attract a suitable husband (Taylor 20, 40). Secondly, within bridal fictions “weddings, marriage, romance, and heterosexuality become naturalized to the point where we consent to the belief that marriage is necessary to achieve a sense of well-being, belonging, passion, morality and love” (Ingraham 120). By presenting the white wedding as a publicly endorsed and visible entry to marriage, bridal fictions produce in fundamental ways normative notions about who is ‘fit’ for marriage and therefore capable of the associated cultural and social values of maturity, responsibility, ‘family values’ and so on. This is particularly critical, as postfeminist identities “are structured by, stark and continuing inequalities and exclusions that relate to ‘race’ and ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and disability as well as gender” (Gill 149). These postfeminist exclusions are very evident in contemporary bridal fictions that feature almost exclusively young to middle-aged, white, able-bodied couples with upper to middle class identities that conform to the heteronormative matrix, both physically and socially. By depicting weddings almost exclusively in this kind of raced, classed and gendered framework, bridal fictions associate the above mentioned values, that are seen as markers for responsible adulthood and citizenship, with those who comply with these norms. In these ways bridal fictions stigmatise those who are not able or do not want to get married, and, moreover, produce a visual regime that determines who is seen as entitled to this kind of socially validated identity. The fact that bridal fictions indeed play a major role in producing marital hegemony is further reflected in the increasing presence of same-sex white weddings in popular culture. These representations, despite their message of equality for everyone, usually replicate rather than re-negotiate the heteronormative terms of bridal culture. This can be regarded as evidence of bridal fiction’s scope and reach in naturalising marriage not only as the most ideal form of a heterosexual relationship, but increasingly as the ideal for any kind of intimate relationship. References Bambacas, Christyana. “Thinking about White Weddings.” Journal of Australian Studies 26.72 (2002): 191–200.The Bachelor, ABC, 2002–present. Boden, Sharon. Consumerism, Romance and the Wedding Experience. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Bridezillas, We TV, 2004–present. Cherlin, Andrew. The-Marriage-Go-Round. The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage, 2010. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage. A History. New York: Penguin, 2005. Currie, Dawn. “‘Here Comes the Bride’: The Making of a ‘Modern Traditional’ Wedding in Western Culture.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 24.3 (1993): 403–21. Engstrom, Erika. The Bride Factory. Mass Portrayals of Women and Weddings. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Fairchild Bridal Study (2005) 27 May 2012. ‹http://www.sellthebride.com/documents/americanweddingsurvey.pdf›. Finlay, Sara-Jane, and Victoria Clarke. “‘A Marriage of Inconvenience?’ Feminist Perspectives on Marriage.” Feminism & Psychology 13.4 (2003): 415–20. Foucault, M. (1980) “Body/Power and Truth/Power” in Gordon, C. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge, Harvester, U.K. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973. Geller, Jaqlyn. Here Comes the Bride. Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001. Genz, Stéphanie. Postfemininities in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 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The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Pearce, Lynn, and Jackie Stacey. Romance Revisited. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995. Race to the Altar, NBC, 2003. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs Summer.5 (1980): 631–60. Taylor, Anthea. Single Women in Popular Culture. The Limits of Postfeminism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Wallace, Carol. All Dressed in White. The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Advertisements Analysed Guiliana Rancic. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›. Daisy Fuentes. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›. Layla Ali. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›.

Introduction It is now commonplace for babies to begin their lives inhabiting media environments characterised by the presence, distribution, and mobility of digital devices and screens. Such arrangements can be traced, in part, to the birth of a new regime of mobile and touchscreen media beginning with the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, which stimulated a surge in household media consumption, underpinned by broadband and wireless Internet infrastructures. Research into these conditions of ambient mediation at the beginnings of life, however, is currently dominated by medical and educational literature, largely removed from media studies approaches that seek to understand the everyday contexts of babies using media. Putting aside discourses of promise or peril familiar to researchers of children’s media (Buckingham; Postman), this paper draws on ongoing research in both domestic and social media settings exploring infants’ everyday encounters and entanglements with mobile media and communication technologies. The paper identifies the ways infants’ mobile communication is assembled and distributed through touchscreen interfaces, proxy parent users, and commercial software sorting. It argues that within these interfacial, intermediary, and interactive contexts, we can conceptualise infants’ communicative agency through an emerging repertoire of techniques: accidental, assisted and automated. This assemblage of infant communication recognises that children no longer live with but in media (Deuze), which underscores the impossibility of a path of media resistance found in medical discourses of ‘exposure’ and restriction, and instead points to the need for critical and ethical responses to these immanent conditions of infant media life. Background and Approach Infants, understandably, have largely been excluded from analyses of mobile mediality given their historically limited engagement with or capacity to use mobile media. Yet, this situation is undergoing change as mobile devices become increasingly prominent in children’s homes (OfCom; Rideout), and as touchscreen interfaces lower thresholds of usability (Buckleitner; Hourcade et al.). The dominant frameworks within research addressing infants and media continue to resonate with long running and widely circulated debates in the study of children and mass media (Wartella and Robb), responding in contradictory ways to what is seen as an ever-increasing ‘technologization of childhood’ (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Education research centres on digital literacy, emphasising the potential of mobile computing for these future digital learners, labourers, and citizens (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Alternatively, health research largely positions mobile media within the rubric of ‘screen time’ inherited from older broadcast models, with paediatric groups continuing to caution parents about the dangers of infants’ ‘exposure’ to electronic screens (Strasburger and Hogan), without differentiating between screen types or activities. In turn, a range of digital media channels seek to propel or profit from infant media culture, with a number of review sites, YouTube channels and tech blogs promoting or surveying the latest gadgets and apps for babies. Within media studies, research is beginning to analyse the practices, conceptions and implications of digital interfaces and content for younger children. Studies are, for example, quantifying the devices, activities, and time spent by young children with mobile devices (Ofcom; Rideout), reviewing the design and marketing of children’s mobile application software products (e.g. Shuler), analysing digital content shared about babies on social media platforms (Kumar & Schoenebeck; Morris), and exploring emerging interactive spaces and technologies shaping young children’s ‘postdigital’ play (Giddings; Jayemanne, Nansen and Apperley). This paper extends this growing area of research by focusing specifically on infants’ early encounters, contexts, and configurations of mobile mediality, offering some preliminary analysis of an emerging repertoire of mobile communication techniques: accidental, assisted, and automated. That is, through infants playing with devices and accidentally activating them; through others such as parents assisting use; and through software features in applications that help to automate interaction. This analysis draws from an ongoing research project exploring young children’s mobile and interactive media use in domestic settings, which is employing ethnographic techniques including household technology tours and interviews, as well as participant observation and demonstrations of infant media interaction. To date 19 families, with 31 children aged between 0 and 5, located in Melbourne, Australia have participated. These participating families are largely homogeneous and privileged; though are a sample of relatively early and heavy adopters that reveal emerging qualities about young children’s changing media environments and encounters. This approach builds on established traditions of media and ethnographic research on technology consumption and use within domestic spaces (e.g. Mackay and Ivey; Silverstone and Hirsch), but turns to the digital media encountered by infants, the geographies and routines of these encounters, and how families mediate these encounters within the contexts of home life. This paper offers some preliminary findings from this research, drawing mostly from discussions with parents about their babies’ use of digital, mobile, and touchscreen media. In this larger project, the domestic and family research is accompanied by the collection of online data focused on the cultural context of, and content shared about, infants’ mobile media use. In this paper I report on social media analysis of publicly shared images tagged with #babyselfie queried from Instagram’s API. I viewed all publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, and collected the associated captions, comments, hashtags, and metadata, over a period of 48 hours in October 2014, resulting in a dataset of 324 posts. Clearly, using this data for research purposes raises ethical issues about privacy and consent given the posts are being used in an unintended context from which they were originally shared; something that is further complicated by the research focus on young children. These issues, in which the ease of extracting online data using digital methods research (Rogers), needs to be both minimised and balanced against the value of the research aims and outcomes (Highfield and Leaver). To minimise risks, captions and comments cited in this paper have been de-identified; whist the value of this data lies in complementing and contextualising the more ethnographically informed research, despite perceptions of incompatibility, through analysis of the wider cultural and mediated networks in which babies’ digital lives are now shared and represented. This field of cultural production also includes analysis of examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores that support baby image capture and sharing, and in particular in this paper discussion of the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. The rationale for drawing on these multiple sources of data within the larger project is to locate young children’s digital entanglements within the diverse places, platforms and politics in which they unfold. This research scope is limited by the constraints of this short paper, however different sources of data are drawn upon here in order to identify, compare, and contextualise the emerging themes of accidental, assisted, and automated. Accidental Media Use The domestication and aggregation of mobile media in the home, principally laptops, mobile phones and tablet computers has established polymediated environments in which infants are increasingly surrounded by mobile media; in which they often observe their parents using mobile devices; and in which the flashing of screens unsurprisingly draws their attention. Living within these ambient media environments, then, infants often observe, find and reach for mobile devices: on the iPad or whatever, then what's actually happening in front of them, then naturally they'll gravitate towards it. These media encounters are animated by touchscreens interfaces that are responsive to the gestural actions of infants. Conversely, touchscreen interfaces drive attempts to swipe legacy media screens. Underscoring the nomenclature of ‘natural user interfaces’ within the design and manufacturer communities, screens lighting up through touch prompts interest, interaction, and even habituation through gestural interaction, especially swiping: It's funny because when she was younger she would go up the T.V. and she would try swiping to turn the channel.They can grab it and start playing with it. It just shows that it's so much part of their world … to swipe something. Despite demonstrable capacities of infants to interact with mobile screens, discussions with parents revealed that accidental forms of media engagement were a more regular consequence of these ambient contexts, interfacial affordances and early encounters with mobile media. It was not uncommon for infants to accidentally swipe and activate applications, to temporarily lock the screen, or even to dial contacts: He didn't know the password, and he just kept locking it … find it disabled for 15 minutes.If I've got that on YouTube, they can quite quickly get on to some you know [video] … by pressing … and they don't do it on purpose, they're just pushing random buttons.He does Skype calls! I think he recognizes their image, the icon. Then just taps it and … Similarly, in the analysis of publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, there were instances in which it appeared infants had accidentally taken photos with the cameraphone based on the image content, photo framing or descriptions in the caption. Many of these photos showed a baby with an arm in view reaching towards the phone in a classic trope of a selfie image; others were poorly framed shots showing parts of baby faces too close to the camera lens suggesting they accidentally took the photograph; whilst most definitive was many instances in which the caption of the image posted by parents directly attributed the photographic production to an infant: Isabella's first #babyselfie She actually pushed the button herself! My little man loves taking selfies lol Whilst, then, the research identified many instances in which infants accidentally engaged in mobile media use, sometimes managing to communicate with an unsuspecting interlocutor, it is important to acknowledge such encounters could not have emerged without the enabling infrastructure of ambient media contexts and touchscreen interfaces, nor observed without studying this infrastructure utilising materially-oriented ethnographic perspectives (Star). Significantly, too, was the intermediary role played by parents. With parents acting as intermediaries in household environments or as proxy users in posting content on their behalf, multiple forms of assisted infant communication were identified. Assisted Media Use Assisted communication emerged from discussions with parents about the ways, routines, and rationale for making mobile media available to their children. These sometimes revolved around keeping their child engaged whilst they were travelling as a family – part of what has been described as the pass-back effect – but were more frequently discussed in terms of sharing and showing digital content, especially family photographs, and in facilitating infant mediated communication with relatives abroad: they love scrolling through my photos on my iPhone …We quite often just have them [on Skype] … have the computers in there while we're having dinner … the laptop will be there, opened up at one end of the table with the family here and there will be my sister having breakfast with her family in Ireland … These forms of parental mediated communication did not, however, simply situate or construct infants as passive recipients of their parents’ desires to make media content available or their efforts to establish communication with extended family members. Instead, the research revealed that infants were often active participants in these processes, pushing for access to devices, digital content, and mediated communication. These distributed relations of agency were expressed through infants verbal requests and gestural urging; through the ways parents initiated use by, for example, unlocking a device, preparing software, or loading an application, but then handed them over to infants to play, explore or communicate; and through wider networks of relations in which others including siblings, acted as proxies or had a say in the kinds of media infants used: she can do it, once I've unlocked … even, even with iView, once I'm on iView she can pick her own show and then go to the channel she wants to go to.We had my son’s birthday and there were some photos, some footage of us singing happy birthday and the little one just wants to watch it over and over again. She thinks it's fantastic watching herself.He [sibling] becomes like a proxy user … with the second one … they don't even need the agency because of their sibling. Similarly, the assisted communication emerging from the analysis of #babyselfie images on Instagram revealed that parents were not simply determining infant media use, but often acting as proxies on their behalf. #Selfie obsessed baby. Seriously though. He won't stop. Insists on pressing the button and everything. He sees my phone and points and says "Pic? Pic?" I've created a monster lol. In sharing this digital content on social networks, parents were acting as intermediaries in the communication of their children’s digital images. Clearly they were determining the platforms and networks where these images were published online, yet the production of these images was more uncertain, with accidental self-portraits taken by infants suggesting they played a key role in the circuits of digital photography distribution (van Dijck). Automated Media Use The production, archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito). Here, software automates process of sorting and shaping information, and in doing so both empowers and governs forms of infant media conduct. The final theme emerging from the research, then, is the identification of automated forms of infant mobile media use enabled through software applications and algorithmic operations. Automated techniques of interaction emerged as part of the repertoire of infant mobile mediality and communication through observations and discussions during the family research, and through surveying commercial software applications. Within family discussions, parents spoke about the ways digital databases and applications facilitated infant exploration and navigation. These included photo galleries stored on mobile devices, as well as children’s Internet television services such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s catch-up online TV service, iView, which are visually organised and easily scrollable. In addition, algorithmic functions for sorting, recommending and autoplay on the video-sharing platform YouTube meant that infants were often automatically delivered an ongoing stream of content: They just keep watching it [YouTube]. So it leads on form the other thing. Which is pretty amazing, that's pretty interactive.Yeah, but the kids like, like if they've watched a YouTube clip now, they'll know to look down the next column to see what they want to play next … you get suggestions there so. Forms of automated communication specifically addressing infants was also located in examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores: the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. These applications are designed to support baby image capture and sharing, promising to “allow your baby to take a photo of him himself [sic]” (Giudicelli), based on automated software features that use sounds and images to capture a babies attention and touch sensors to activate image capture and storage. In one sense, these applications may appear to empower infants to participate in the production of digital content, namely selfies, yet they also clearly distribute this agency with and through mobile media and digital software. Moreover, they imply forms of conduct, expectations and imperatives around the possibilities of infant presence in a participatory digital culture. Immanent Ethic and Critique Digital participation typically assumes a degree of individual agency in deciding what to share, post, or communicate that is not typically available to infants. The emerging communicative practices of infants detailed above suggests that infants are increasingly connecting, however this communicative agency is distributed amongst a network of ambient devices, user-friendly interfaces, proxy users, and software sorting. Such distributions reflect conditions Deuze has noted, that we do not live with but in media. He argues this ubiquity, habituation, and embodiment of media and communication technologies pervade and constitute our lives becoming effectively invisible, negating the possibility of an outside from which resistance can be mounted. Whilst, resistance remains a solution promoted in medical discourses and paediatric advice proposing no ‘screen time’ for children aged below two (Strasburger and Hogan), Deuze’s thesis suggests this is ontologically futile and instead we should strive for a more immanent relation that seeks to modulate choices and actions from within our media life: finding “creative ways to wield the awesome communication power of media both ethically and aesthetically” ("Unseen" 367). An immanent ethics and a critical aesthetics of infant mediated life can be located in examples of cultural production and everyday parental practice addressing the arrangements of infant mobile media and communication discussed above. For example, an article in the Guardian, ‘Toddlers pose a serious risk to smartphones and tablets’ parodies moral panics around children’s exposure to media by noting that media devices are at greater risk of physical damage from children handling them, whilst a design project from the Eindhoven Academy – called New Born Fame – built from soft toys shaped like social media logos, motion and touch sensors that activate image capture (much like babyselfie apps), but with automated social media sharing, critically interrogates the ways infants are increasingly bound-up with the networked and algorithmic regimes of our computational culture. Finally, parents in this research revealed that they carefully considered the ethics of media in their children’s lives by organising everyday media practices that balanced dwelling with new, old, and non media forms, and by curating their digitally mediated interactions and archives with an awareness they were custodians of their children’s digital memories (Garde-Hansen et al.). I suggest these examples work from an immanent ethical and critical position in order to make visible and operate from within the conditions of infant media life. Rather than seeking to deny or avoid the diversity of encounters infants have with and through mobile media in their everyday lives, this analysis has explored the ways infants are increasingly configured as users of mobile media and communication technologies, identifying an emerging repertoire of infant mobile communication techniques. The emerging practices of infant mobile communication outlined here are intertwined with contemporary household media environments, and assembled through accidental, assisted, and automated relations of living with mobile media. Moreover, such entanglements of use are both represented and discursively reconfigured through multiple channels, contexts, and networks of public mediation. Together, these diverse contexts and forms of conduct have implications for both studying and understanding the ways babies are emerging as active participants and interpellated subjects within a continually expanding digital culture. Acknowledgments This research was supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100735). I would like to express my appreciation to the children and families involved in this study for their generous contribution of time and experiences. References Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Polity Press: Oxford, 2000. Buckleitner, Warren. “A Taxonomy of Multi-Touch Interaction Styles, by Stage.” Children's Technology Review 18.11 (2011): 10-11. Chun, Wendy. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Deuze, Mark. “Media Life.” Media, Culture and Society 33.1 (2011): 137-148. Deuze, Mark. “The Unseen Disappearance of Invisible Media: A Response to Sebastian Kubitschko and Daniel Knapp.” Media, Culture and Society 34.3 (2012): 365-368. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading. Save as … Digital Memories. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Giddings, Seth. Gameworlds: Virtual Media and Children’s Everyday Play. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Relevance of Algorithms.” Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Eds. Tarelton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Giudicelli, Patrick. "My Baby Selfie." iTunes App Store. Apple Inc., 2015. Highfield, Tim, and Tama Leaver. “A Methodology for Mapping Instagram Hashtags.” First Monday 20.1 (2015). Hourcade, Juan Pablo, Sarah Mascher, David Wu, and Luiza Pantoja. “Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of Youtube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using Tablets.” Proceedings of CHI 15. New York: ACM Press, 2015. 1915–1924. Ito, Mizuko. Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Jayemanne, Darshana, Bjorn Nansen and Thomas Apperley. “Post-Digital Play and the Aesthetics of Recruitment.” Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) 2015. Lüneburg, 14-17 May 2015. Kumar, Priya, and Sarita Schoenebeck. “The Modern Day Baby Book: Enacting Good Mothering and Stewarding Privacy on Facebook.” Proceedings of CSCW 2015. Vancouver, 14-18 March 2015. Mackay, Hugh, and Darren Ivey. Modern Media in the Home: An Ethnographic Study. Rome: John Libbey, 2004. Morris, Meredith. “Social Networking Site Use by Mothers of Young Children.” Proceedings of CSCW 2014. 1272-1282. OfCom. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report. London: OfCom, 2013. McPake, Joanna, Lydia Plowman and Christine Stephen. "The Technologisation of Childhood? Young Children and Technology in The Home.” Children and Society 24.1 (2010): 63–74. Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage, 1993. Rideout, Victoria. Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013. Common Sense Media, 2013. Rogers, Richard. Digital Methods. Boston. MIT Press, 2013. Silverstone, Roger, and Eric Hirsch (eds). Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. London: Routledge, 1992. Shuler, Carly. iLearn: A Content Analysis of the iTunes App Store’s Education Section. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, 2009. Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43.3 (1999): 377–391. Strasburger, Victor, and Marjorie Hogan. “Policy Statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics: Children, Adolescents, and the Media.” Pediatrics 132 (2013): 958-961. Van Dijck, José. “Digital Photography: Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory.” Visual Communication 7.1 (2008): 57-76. Wartella, Ellen, and Michael Robb. “Historical and Recurring Concerns about Children’s Use of the Mass Media.” The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development. Eds. Sandra Calvert and Barbara Wilson. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.

In Victorian times, when female travel narratives were read as excursions rather than expeditions, it was common for women authors to preface their travels with an apology. “What this book wants,” begins Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, “is not a simple preface but an apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that” (4). This tendency of the woman writer to depreciate her travel with an acknowledgment of its presumptuousness crafted her apology essentially as an admission of guilt. “Where I have offered my opinions,” Isabella Bird writes in The Englishwoman in America, “I have done so with extreme diffidence, giving impressions rather than conclusions” (2). While Elizabeth Howells has since argued the apologetic preface was in fact an opposing strategy that allowed women writers to assert their authority by averting it, it is certainly telling of the time and genre that a female writer could only defend her work by first excusing it. The personal apology may have emerged as the natural response to social restrictions but it has not been without consequence for female travel. The female position, often constructed as communal, is still problematised in contemporary travel texts. While there has been a traceable shift from apology to affirmation since the first women travellers abandoned their embroidery, it seems some sense of lingering culpability still remains. In many ways, the modern female traveller, like the early lady traveller, is still a displaced woman. She still sets out cautiously, guide book in hand. Often she writes, like the female confessant, in an attempt to recover what Virginia Woolf calls “the lives of the obscure”: those found locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers or simply unrecorded (44). Often she speaks insistently of the abstract things which Kingsley, ironically, wrote so easily and extensively about. She is, however, even when writing from within the confines of her own home, still writing from abroad. Women’s solitary or “unescorted” travel, even in contemporary times, is considered less common in the Western world, with recurrent travel warnings constantly targeted at female travellers. Travelling women are always made aware of the limits of their body and its vulnerabilities. Mary Morris comments on “the fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara or just crossing a city street at night” (xvii). While a certain degree of danger always exists in travel for men and women alike and while it is inevitable that some of those risks are gender-specific, travel is frequently viewed as far more hazardous for women. Guide books, travel magazines and online advice columns targeted especially at female readers are cramped with words of concern and caution for women travellers. Often, the implicit message that women are too weak and vulnerable to travel is packaged neatly into “a cache of valuable advice” with shocking anecdotes and officious chapters such as “Dealing with Officials”, “Choosing Companions” or “If You Become a Victim” (Swan and Laufer vii). As these warnings are usually levelled at white, middle to upper class women who have the freedom and financing to travel, the question arises as to what is really at risk when women take to the road. It seems the usual dialogue between issues of mobility and issues of safety can be read more complexly as confusions between questions of mobility and morality. As Kristi Siegel explains, “among the various subtexts embedded in these travel warnings is the long-held fear of ‘women on the loose’” (4). According to Karen Lawrence, travel has always entailed a “risky and rewardingly excessive” terrain for women because of the historical link between wandering and promiscuity (240). Paul Hyland has even suggested that the nature of travel itself is “gloriously” promiscuous: “the shifting destination, arrival again and again, the unknown possessed, the quest for an illusory home” (211). This construction of female travel as a desire to wander connotes straying behaviours that are often cast in sexual terms. The identification of these traits in early criminological research, such as 19th century studies of cacogenic families, is often linked to travel in a broad sense. According to Nicolas Hahn’s study, Too Dumb to Know Better, contributors to the image of the “bad” woman frequently cite three traits as characteristic. “First, they have pictured her as irresolute and all too easily lead. Second, they have usually shown her to be promiscuous and a good deal more lascivious than her virtuous sister. Third, they have often emphasised the bad woman’s responsibility for not only her own sins, but those of her mate and descendents as well” (3). Like Eve, who wanders around the edge of the garden, the promiscuous woman has long been said to have a wandering disposition. Interestingly, however, both male and female travel writers have at different times and for dissimilar reasons assumed hermaphroditic identities while travelling. The female traveller, for example, may assume the figure of “the observer” or “the reporter with historical and political awareness”, while the male traveller may feminise his behaviours to confront inevitabilities of confinement and mortality (Fortunati, Monticelli and Ascari 11). Female travellers such as Alexandra David-Neel and Isabelle Eberhardt who ventured out of the home and cross-dressed for safety or success, deliberately and fully appropriated traditional roles of the male sex. Often, this attempt by female wanderers to fulfil their own intentions in cognito evaded their dismissal as wild and unruly women and asserted their power over those duped by their disguise. Those women who did travel openly into the world were often accused of flaunting the gendered norms of female decorum with their “so-called unnatural and inappropriate behaviour” (Siegel 3). The continued harnessing of this cultural taboo by popular media continues to shape contemporary patterns of female travel. In fact, as a result of perceived connections between wandering and danger, the narrative of the woman traveller often emerges as a self-conscious fiction where “the persona who emerges on the page is as much a character as a woman in a novel” (Bassnett 234). This process of self-fictionalising converts the travel writing into a graph of subliminal fears and desires. In Tracks, for example, which is Robyn Davidson’s account of her solitary journey by camel across the Australian desert, Davidson shares with her readers the single, unvarying warning she received from the locals while preparing for her expedition. That was, if she ventured into the desert alone without a guide or male accompaniment, she would be attacked and raped by an Aboriginal man. In her opening pages, Davidson recounts a conversation in the local pub when one of the “kinder regulars” warns her: “You ought to be more careful, girl, you know you’ve been nominated by some of these blokes as the next town rape case” (19). “I felt really frightened for the first time,” Davidson confesses (20). Perhaps no tale better depicts this gendered troubling than the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. In the earliest versions of the story, Little Red outwits the Wolf with her own cunning and escapes without harm. By the time the first printed version emerges, however, the story has dramatically changed. Little Red now falls for the guise of the Wolf, and tricked by her captor, is eaten without rescue or escape. Charles Perrault, who is credited with the original publication, explains the moral at the end of the tale, leaving no doubt to its intended meaning. “From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, and it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner” (77). Interestingly, in the Grimm Brothers’ version which emerges two centuries later an explicit warning now appears in the tale, in the shape of the mother’s instruction to “walk nicely and quietly, and not run off the path” (144). This new inclusion sanitises the tale and highlights the slippages between issues of mobility and morality. Where Little Red once set out with no instruction not to wander, she is now told plainly to stay on the path; not for her own safety but for implied matters of virtue. If Little Red strays while travelling alone she risks losing her virginity and, of course, her virtue (Siegel 55). Essentially, this is what is at stake when Little Red wanders; not that she will get lost in the woods and be unable to find her way, but that in straying from the path and purposefully disobeying her mother, she will no longer be “a dear little girl” (Grimm 144). In the Grimms’ version, Red Riding Hood herself critically reflects on her trespassing from the safe space of the village to the dangerous world of the forest and makes a concluding statement that demonstrates she has learnt her lesson. “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so” (149). Red’s message to her female readers is representative of the social world’s message to its women travellers. “We are easily distracted and disobedient, we are not safe alone in the woods (travelling off the beaten path); we are fairly stupid; we get ourselves into trouble; and we need to be rescued by a man” (Siegel 56). As Siegel explains, even Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood, who bursts out laughing when the Wolf says “all the better to eat you with” for “she knew she was nobody’s meat” (219), still shocks readers when she uses her virginity to take power over the voracious Wolf. In Carter’s world “children do not stay young for long,” and Little Red, who has her knife and is “afraid of nothing”, is certainly no exception (215). Yet in the end, when Red seduces the Wolf and falls asleep between his paws, there is still a sense this is a twist ending. As Siegel explains, “even given the background Carter provides in the story’s beginning, the scene startles. We knew the girl was strong, independent, and armed. However, the pattern of woman-alone-travelling-alone-helpless-alone-victim is so embedded in our consciousness we are caught off guard” (57). In Roald Dahl’s revolting rhyme, Little Red is also awarded agency, not through sexual prerogative, but through the enactment of traits often considered synonymous with male bravado: quick thinking, wit and cunning. After the wolf devours Grandmamma, Red pulls a pistol from her underpants and shoots him dead. “The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers. She aims it at the creature’s head and bang bang bang, she shoots him dead” (lines 48—51). In the weeks that follow Red’s triumph she even takes a trophy, substituting her red cloak for a “furry wolfskin coat” (line 57). While Dahl subverts female stereotypes through Red’s decisive action and immediacy, there is still a sense, perhaps heightened by the rhyming couplets, that we are not to take the shooting seriously. Instead, Red’s girrrl-power is an imagined celebration; it is something comical to be mused over, but its shock value lies in its impossibility; it is not at all believable. While the sexual overtones of the tale have become more explicit in contemporary film adaptations such as David Slade’s Hard Candy and Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, the question that arises is what is really at threat, or more specifically who is threatened, when women travel off the well-ordered path of duty. As this problematic continues to surface in discussions of the genre, other more nuanced readings have also distorted the purpose and practice of women’s travel. Some psychoanalytical theorists, for example, have adopted Freud’s notion of travel as an escape from the family, particularly the father figure. In his essay A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, Freud explains how his own longing to travel was “a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home” (237). “When one first catches sight of the sea,” Freud writes, “one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness” (237). The inherent gender trouble with such a reading is the suggestion women only move in search of a quixotic male figure, “fleeing from their real or imaginary powerful fathers and searching for an idealised and imaginary ‘loving father’ instead” (Berger 55). This kind of thinking reduces the identities of modern women to fragile, unfinished selves, whose investment in travel is always linked to recovering or resisting a male self. Such readings neglect the unique history of women’s travel writing as they dismiss differences in the male and female practice and forget that “travel itself is a thoroughly gendered category” (Holland and Huggan 111). Freud’s experience of travel, for example, his description of feeling like a “hero” who has achieved “improbable greatness” is problematised by the female context, since the possibility arises that women may travel with different e/motions and, indeed, motives to their male counterparts. For example, often when a female character does leave home it is to escape an unhappy marriage, recover from a broken heart or search for new love. Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling travelogue, Eat, Pray, Love (which spent 57 weeks at the number one spot of the New York Times), found its success on the premise of a once happily married woman who, reeling from a contentious divorce, takes off around the world “in search of everything” (1). Since its debut, the novel has been accused of being self-absorbed and sexist, and even branded by the New York Post as “narcissistic New Age reading, curated by Winfrey” (Callahan par 13). Perhaps most interesting for discussions of travel morality, however, is Bitch magazine’s recent article Eat, Pray, Spend, which suggests that the positioning of the memoir as “an Everywoman’s guide to whole, empowered living” typifies a new literature of privilege that excludes “all but the most fortunate among us from participating” (Sanders and Barnes-Brown par 7). Without seeking to limit the novel with separatist generalisations, the freedoms of Elizabeth Gilbert (a wealthy, white American novelist) to leave home and to write about her travels afterwards have not always been the freedoms of all women. As a result of this problematic, many contemporary women mark out alternative patterns of movement when travelling, often moving deliberately in a variety of directions and at varying paces, in an attempt to resist their placelessness in the travel genre and in the mappable world. As Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, speaking of Housekeeping’s Ruthie and Sylvie, explains, “they do not travel ever westward in search of some frontier space, nor do they travel across great spaces. Rather, they circle, they drift, they wander” (199). As a result of this double displacement, women have to work twice as hard to be considered credible travellers, particularly since travel is traditionally a male discursive practice. In this tradition, the male is often constructed as the heroic explorer while the female is mapped as a place on his itinerary. She is a point of conquest, a land to be penetrated, a site to be mapped and plotted, but rarely a travelling equal. Annette Kolodny considers this metaphor of “land-as-woman” (67) in her seminal work, The Lay of the Land, in which she discusses “men’s impulse to alter, penetrate and conquer” unfamiliar space (87). Finally, it often emerges that even when female travel focuses specifically on an individual or collective female experience, it is still read in opposition to the long tradition of travelling men. In their introduction to Amazonian, Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler maintain the primary difference between male and female travel writers is that “the male species” has not become extinct (vii). The pair, who have theorised widely on New Travel Writing, identify some of the myths and misconceptions of the female genre, often citing their own encounters with androcentrism in the industry. “We have found that even when people are confronted by a real, live woman travel writer, they still get us wrong. In the time allowed for questions after a lecture, we are regularly asked, ‘Was that before you sailed around the world or after?’ even though neither of us has ever done any such thing” (xvii). The obvious bias in such a comment is an archaic view of what qualifies as “good” travel and a preservation of the stereotypes surrounding women’s intentions in leaving home. As Birkett and Wheeler explain, “the inference here is that to qualify as travel writers women must achieve astonishing and record-breaking feats. Either that, or we’re trying to get our hands down some man’s trousers. One of us was once asked by the president of a distinguished geographical institution, ‘What made you go to Chile? Was it a guy?’” (xviii). In light of such comments, there remain traceable difficulties for contemporary female travel. As travel itself is inherently gendered, its practice has often been “defined by men according to the dictates of their experience” (Holland and Huggan 11). As a result, its discourse has traditionally reinforced male prerogatives to wander and female obligations to wait. Even the travel trade itself, an industry that often makes its profits out of preying on fear, continues to shape the way women move through the world. While the female traveller then may no longer preface her work with an explicit apology, there are still signs she is carrying some historical baggage. It is from this site of trouble that new patterns of female travel will continue to emerge, distinguishably and defiantly, towards a much more colourful vista of general misrule. References Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 225-40. Berger, Arthur Asa. Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004. Bird, Isabella. The Englishwoman in America. London: John Murray, 1856. Birkett, Dea, and Sara Wheeler, eds. Amazonian: The Penguin Book of New Women’s Travel Writing. London: Penguin, 1998. Callahan, Maureen. “Eat, Pray, Loathe: Latest Self-Help Bestseller Proves Faith is Blind.” New York Post 23 Dec. 2007. Carter, Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. London: Vintage, 1995. 212-20. Dahl, Roald. Revolting Rhymes. London: Puffin Books, 1982. Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Fortunati, Vita, Rita Monticelli, and Maurizio Ascari, eds. Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary. Bologna: Patron Editore, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 1936. 237-48. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New Jersey: Penguin, 2007. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Little Red Riding Hood.” Grimms’ Fairy Tales, London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. 144-9. Hahn, Nicolas. “Too Dumb to Know Better: Cacogenic Family Studies and the Criminology of Women.” Criminology 18.1 (1980): 3-25. Hard Candy. Dir. David Slade. Lionsgate. 2005. Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003. Howells, Elizabeth. “Apologizing for Authority: The Rhetoric of the Prefaces of Eliza Cook, Isabelle Bird, and Hannah More.” Professing Rhetoric: Selected Papers from the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America Conference, eds. F.J. Antczak, C. Coggins, and G.D. Klinger. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. 131-7. Hyland, Paul. The Black Heart: A Voyage into Central Africa. New York: Paragon House, 1988. Kingsley, Mary. Travels in West Africa. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2008. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. USA: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Lawrence, Karen. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Morris, Mary. Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travellers. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Perrault, Charles. Perrault’s Complete Fairytales. Trans. A.E. Johnson and others. London: Constable & Company, 1961. Red Riding Hood. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. Warner Bros. 2011. Sanders, Joshunda, and Diana Barnes-Brown. “Eat, Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream” Bitch Magazine 47 (2010). 10 May, 2011 < http://bitchmagazine.org/article/eat-pray-spend >. Siegel, Kristi. Ed. Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Slettedahl Macpherson, Heidi. “Women’s Travel Writing and the Politics of Location: Somewhere In-Between.” Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. Kristi Siegel. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 194-207. Swan, Sheila, and Peter Laufer. Safety and Security for Women who Travel. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Travelers’ Tales, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. Women and Writing. London: The Women’s Press, 1979.

As a mode of open access public self-expression, blogs are one form of the unfolding massification of culture (Lovink). Though widely varied in content and style, they are characterised by a reverse chronological diary-like format, often produced by a single author, and often intimately expressive of that author’s thoughts and experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of blogs as a space for the detailed and on-going expression of the day to day experiences of sufferers of serious illness. We might traditionally consider the experience of illness as absolutely private, but illness, along with the process of recovery, retains a social and cultural aspect (Kleinman et al). A growing body of literature has recognised that the Internet has become a significant space for the recovery work that accompanies the diagnosis of serious illness (Orgad; Pitts; Hardey). Empowerment and agency are often emphasised in this literature, particularly in terms of the increased access to information and support groups, but also in the dynamic performances of self enabled by different forms of online communication and Web production. I am particularly interested in the ongoing shifts in the accessibility of “private” personal experience enabled by blog culture. Although there are thousands of others like them, three “illness blogs” have recently caught my attention for their candidness, completeness and complexity, expressing in vivid depth and detail individual lives transformed by serious illness. The late US journalist and television producer Leroy Sievers maintained a high profile blog, My Cancer, and weekly podcast on the National Public Radio website until his death from metastasised colon cancer in August 2008. Sievers used his public profile and the infrastructure of the NPR website to both detail his personal experience and bring together a community of people also affected by cancer or moved by his thoughts and experiences. The blogger Brainhell came to my attention through blogsphere comments and tributes when he died in February 2008. Spanning more than four years, Brainhell’s witty and charming blog attracted a significant audience and numerous comments, particularly toward the end of his life as the signs of his deteriorating motor system as a result of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or “Lou Gherig’s disease”) riddled his intimate posts. Another blog of interest to me here, called Humanities Researcher, incorporates academic Stephanie Trigg’s period of illness and recovery from breast cancer within a pre-existing and ongoing blog about the intersection between professional and personal life. As I had crossed paths with Trigg while at Melbourne University, I was always interested in her blog. But her diagnosis with breast cancer and subsequent accounts of tests, the pain and debilitation of treatment and recovery within her blog also offer valuable insight into the role of online technologies in affecting experiences of illness and for the process of recovery.The subject matter of illness blogs revolves around significant personal transformations as a result of serious illness or trauma: transformations of everyday life, of body and emotional states, relationships, physical appearance, and the loss or recovery of physical ability. It is not my intention in this brief analysis to overgeneralise on the basis of some relatively limited observations. However, many blogs written in response to illness stand out for what they reveal about the shifting location or locatability of self, experience and the events of ongoing illness and thus how we can conceptualise the inherent “privacy” of illness as personal experience. Self-expression here is encompassing of the possibilities through which illness can be experienced – not as representation of that experience, a performance of a disembodied self (though these notions have their merits) – but an expressive element of the substance of the illness as it is experienced over time, as it affects the bodies, thoughts, events and relationships of individuals moving toward a state of full recovery or untimely death. Locating Oneself OnlineMany authors currently examining the role of online spaces in the lives of sufferers of serious illness see online communication as providing a means for configuring experience as a meaningful and coherent story, and thus conferring, or we could say recovering, a sense of agency amidst a tumultuous and ongoing battle with serious illness (Orgad, Pitts). In her study of breast cancer discussion forums, message boards and websites, Orgad (4) notes their role in regaining “the fundamentals disturbed by cancer” (see also Bury). Well before the emergence of online spaces, the act or writing has been seen as “a crucial affirmation of living, a statement against fearfulness, invisibility and silence” (Orgad, 67; Lorde, 61). For many decades scientists have asserted that “brief structured writing sessions can significantly improve mental and physical health for some groups of people” (Singer and Singer 485). The Internet has provided an infrastructure for bringing personal experiences of illness into the public realm, enabling a new level of visibility. Much of the work on illness and the Internet focuses on the liberatory and empowering act of story telling and “disembodied” self-expression. Discussion forums and cancer websites enable the formation of patient led “discourse communities” (Wuthnow). Online spaces such as discussion forums help their participants gain a foothold within a world they share with other sufferers, building communities of practice (Wegner) around specific forms of illness. In this way, these forms of self-expression and communication enable the sufferer of serious illness to counter the modes by which they are made “subjects”, in the Foucauldian sense, of medical discourse. All illness narratives are defined and constructed socially, and are infused with relations of power (Sontag; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic). Forms of online communication have shifted productive practice from professions to patients. Blogs, like discussion forums, websites, email lists etc., have come to play a central role in this contemporary shift. When Lovink (6) describes blogs as a “technology of the self” he points to their role in “self-fashioning”. Blogs written about and in the context of personal illness are a perfect example of this inclination to speak the truth of oneself in the confessional mode of modern culture borne of the church, science and talkshow television. For Foucault (Technologies of the Self, 17), technologies of the self: Permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality. Likewise, as a central concept for understanding Internet identity, the notion of performance (eg, Turkle) highlights the creativity with which illness bloggers may present their role as cancer patient in online spaces, perhaps as an act of resistance to “subjectifying” medical discourses and practices. Many bloggers wrest semiotic power through regular discussion of the language of pathology and medical knowledge, treatment processes and drugs. In the early stages of her treatment, Trigg plays with the new vocabulary, searching for etiologies and making her own semantic connections: I’ve learnt two new words. “Spiculated” describes the characteristic shape of a carcinoma on an ultrasound or x-ray. …The other word is at the other end of the spectrum of linguistic beauty: “lumpectomy”. It took me quite a while to realise that this was not really any different from partial mastectomy; or local excision. It’s an example of the powerful semantic connotations of words to realise that these phrases name the same processes: a long cut, and then the extraction of the diseased tissue (Humanities Researcher, 14 Oct. 2006).Partly due to the rarity of his illness, Brainhell goes through weeks of waiting for a diagnosis, and posts prolifically in an attempt to test out self-diagnoses. Amidst many serious and humorous posts analysing test results and discussing possible diagnoses Brainhell reflects on his targeted use of the blog: I am a word person. I think in sentences. I often take complex technical problems at work and describe them to myself in words. A story helps me understand things better. This blog has become a tool for me to organize my own thoughts about the Mystery Condition. (Brainhell, 6 Jan. 2004)The emancipatory potential of blog writing, however, can be easily overstated. While it is valuable to note and celebrate the performative potential of online production, and its “transformative” role as a technology of the self, it is easy to fall back on an unproblematic distinction between the actual and the virtual, the experience of illness, and its representation in online spaces. Textual expression should always refer us to the extra-textual practices that encompass it without imposing an artificial hierarchy of online and offline, actual experience and representation. As with other forms of online communication and production, the blog culture that has emerged around forms of serious illness plays a significant role in transforming our concepts of the relationship between online and offline spaces. In his My Cancer blog, Sievers often refers to “Cancer World”. He notes, for example, the many “passing friends” he makes in Cancer World through the medical staff and other regular patients at the radiation clinic, and refers to the equipment that sustains his life as the accoutrements of this world. His blog posts revolved around an articulation of the intricacies of this “world” that is in some ways a means of making sense of that world, but is also expressive of it. Sievers tries to explain the notion of Cancer World as a transformation of status between insider & outsider: “once we cross over into Cancer World, we become strangers in a strange land. What to expect, what to hope for, what to fear – none of those are clear right now” (My Cancer, 30 June 2008). Part of his struggle with the illness is also with the expression of himself as encompassed by this new “world” of the effects and activities of cancer. In a similar way, in her Humanities Researcher blog Trigg describes in beautiful detail the processes, routines and relationships formed during radiation treatment. I see these accounts of the textures of cancer spaces as lying at the point of juncture between expression and experience, not as a disembodied, emancipatory realm free from the fetters of illness and the everyday “real” self, but always encompassed by, and encompassing them, and in this way shifting what might be understood to remain “private” in personal experience and self-expression. Blogs as Public Diary Axel Bruns (171), following Matthew Rothenberg, characterises blogs as an accessible technological extension of the personal home page, gaining popularity in the late 1990s because they provided more easy to use templates and web publishing tools than earlier webpage applications. Personalised self expression is a defining element. However, the temporal quality of the reverse chronological, timestamped entry is equally significant for Bruns (171). Taking a broader focus to Bruns, who is most interested in the potential democratisation of media in news related blogs, Lovink sees the experimentation with a “public diary” format as fundamental, signalling their “productive contradiction between public and private” (Lovink 6). A diary may be written for posterity but it is primarily a secretive mode of communication. While blogs may mirror the temporal form of a diary, their intimate focus on self-expression of experience, thoughts and feelings, they do so in a very different communicative context.Despite research suggesting that a majority of bloggers report that they post primarily “for themselves” (Lenhart and Fox) – meaning that they do not deliberately seek a broad audience or readership – the step of making experiences and thoughts so widely accessible cannot be overlooked in any account of blogging. The question of audience or readership, for example, concerns Trigg in her Humanities Researcher blog: The immediacy of a blog distinguishes it from a journal or diary. I wrote for myself, of course, but also for a readership I could measure and chart and hear from, sometimes within minutes of posting. Mostly I don’t know who my readers are, but the kindness and friendship that come to me through the blog gave me courage to write about the intimacies of my treatment; and to chart the emotional upheaval it produced. (Trigg)In their ability to produce a comprehensive expression of the events, experiences, thoughts and feelings of an individual, blogs differ to other forms of online communication such as discussion forums or email lists. Illness blogs are perhaps an extreme example, an open mode of self-expression often arising abruptly in reaction to a life transforming diagnosis and tracking the process of recovery or deterioration, usually ending with remission or death. Brainhell’s blog begins with MRI results, and a series of posts about medical examination and self-examination regarding his mystery condition: So the MRI shows there is something on my brain that is not supposed to be there. The doctor thinks it is not a tumor. That would be good news. …As long as you are alive and have someone to complain to, you ain’t bad off. I am alive and I am complaining about a mystery spot on my brain, and lazy limbs. (Brainhell, 24 Dec. 2003)Brainhell spent many weeks documenting his search for a diagnosis, and continued writing up to his final deterioration and death in 2008. His final posts convey his physical deterioration in truncated sentences, spelling errors and mangled words. In one post he expresses his inability to wake his caregiver and to communicate his distress and physical discomfort at having to pee: when he snorted on waking, i shrieked and he got me up. splayed uncomfortably in the wc as he put dry clothes on me, i was gifted with his words: “you choose this, not me. you want to make it hard, what can i do?” (Brainhell, 13 Jan. 2008). The temporal and continuous format of the blog traverses the visceral, corporeal transformations of body and thought over time. The diary format goes beyond a straightforward narrative form in being far more experiential and even experimental in its self-reflective expression of the events of daily life, thoughts, feelings and states of being. Its public format bears directly on its role in shaping the communicative context in which that expression takes place, and thus to an extent shapes the experience of the illness itself. Nowhere does the expressive substance of the blog so fully encompass the possibilities through which the illness could be experienced than in the author’s death. At this point the blog feels like it is more than a catalogue, dialogue or self-presentation of a struggle with illness. It may take on the form of a memorial (see for example Tom’s Road to Recovery) – a recovery of the self expressed in the daily physical demise, through data maintained in the memory of servers. Ultimately the blog stands as a complex trace of the life lived within its posts. Brainhell’s lengthy blog exemplifies this quite hauntingly. Revealing the Private in Public Blogs exemplify a further step in the transformation of notions of public and private brought about by information and screen technologies. McQuire (103) refers to contemporary screen and Internet culture as “a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies”. Reality television, such as Big Brother, has promoted “a new mode for the public viewing of private life” (McQuire 114) contributing to the normalisation of open access to personal, intimate revelations, actions and experiences. However, privacy is “an elusive concept” that relates as much to information and property as to self-expression and personal experience (McCullagh). That is, what we consider private to an individual is itself constituted by our variable categories of personal information, material or immaterial possessions, or what counts as an expression of personal experience. Some analysts of online storytelling in the context of illness recognise the unsustainability of the distinction between public and private, but nonetheless rely on the notion of a continuum upon which activities or events could be considered as experienced in a public or private space (Orgad, 129-133). One of the characteristics of a blog, unlike other forms of online communication such as chat, discussion forums and email, is its predominantly public and openly accessible form. Though many illness bloggers do not seem to seek anonymity or hold back in allowing massive access to their self-expression and personal experience, a tension always seems to be there in the background. Identification through the proper name simply implies potential broader effects of blog writing, a pairing of the personal expressions with the person who expresses them in broader daily interactions and relationships. As already “public” figures, Stephanie Trigg and Leroy Sievers choose to forego anonymity, while Brainhell adopted his alias from the beginning and guarded his anonymity carefully. Each of these bloggers, however, shows signs of grappling with the public character of their site, and the interaction between the blog and their everyday life and relationships. In his etiquette page, Brainhell seems unclear about his readership, noting that his blog is for “friends and soul-mates, and complete strangers too”, but that he has not shared it with his family or all of his friends. He goes on to say: You may not have been invited but you are still welcome here. I made it public so that anyone could read it. Total strangers are welcome. Invited friends are welcome. But of those invited friends, I ask you to ask me before you out me as the blog author, or share the blog with other people who already know me. (Brainhell, 18 Feb. 2004) After his death Ratty took steps to continue to maintain his anonymity, vetting many comments and deleting others to “honor BH’s wishes as he outline in ‘Ettiquett for This Blog”’ (Brainhell, 2 Feb. 2008). In Leroy Sievers’ blog, one post exploring the conflict raised by publicly “sharing” his experiences provoked an interesting discussion. He relays a comment sent to him by a woman named Cherie: I have stage four colorectal cancer with liver mets. This is a strange journey, one I am not entirely sure I can share with my loved ones. I am scared it might rob them of the hope I see in their eyes. The hope which I sometimes don’t believe in. (My Cancer, 26 July 2006) Sievers struggles with this question: “How do you balance the need to talk about what is happening to you with the tears of a close friend when you tell him or her the truth? There’s no simple answer.” The blog, in this sense, seems to offer a more legitimate space for the ongoing, detailed expression of these difficult and affective, and traditionally private experiences. In some posts the privacy of the body and bodily experiences is directly challenged or re-negotiated. Stephanie Trigg was concerned with the effect of the blog on her interactions with colleagues. But another interesting dilemma presents itself to her when she is describing the physical effects of cancer, surgery and radiation treatment on her breast, and forces herself to hold back from comparing with the healthy breast: “it's not a medical breast, so I can't write about it here” (Humanities Researcher, 10 Jan. 2007). One prostate cancer blogger, identified as rdavisjr, seems to have no difficulties expressing the details of a physical intrusion on his “privacy” in the far more open forum of his blog: The pull-around ceiling mounted screen was missing (laundry?), so Kelly was called into the room and told to make a screen with a bed sheet. So here I am with one woman sticking her finger up my ass, while another woman is standing in front of the door holding an outstretched bed sheet under her chin (guess she wanted a view!)The screen was necessary to ensure my privacy in the event someone accidentally came into the room, something they said was a common thing. Well, Kelly peering over that sheet was hardly one of my more private moments in life! (Prostate Cancer Journal, 23 Feb. 2001). ConclusionWhatever emancipatory benefits may be found in expressing the most intimate of experiences and events of a serious illness online, it is the creative act of the blog as self-expression here, in its visceral, comprehensive, continuous timestamped format that dismantles the sense of privacy in the name of recovery. The blog is not the public face of private personal experience, but expressive of the life encompassed by that illness, and encompassing its author’s ongoing personal transformation. The blogs discussed here are not alone in demonstrating these practices. The blog format itself may soon evolve or disappear. Nonetheless, the massification enabled by Internet technologies and applications will continue to transform the ways in which personal experience may be considered private. ReferencesBruns, Axel. Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.Bury, Michael. “Chronic Illness as Biographical Disruption.” Sociology of Health and Illness, 4.2 (1982): 167-182.Foucault, Michel. Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1973.———. “Technologies of the Self” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick M. Hutton, 1988: 16-49. Hardey, Michael. “‘The Story of My Illness’: Personal Accounts of Illness on the Internet.” Health 6.1 (2002): 31-46Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Lenhart, Amanda, and Susannah Fox. Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers. Washington: PEW Internet and American Life Project, 2006. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1980.Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. London: Routledge, 2008. McCullagh, Karen. “Blogging: Self Presentation and Privacy.” Information and Communications Technology Law 17.1 (2008): 3-23. McQuire, Scott. “From Glass Architecture to Big Brother: Scenes from a Cultural History of Transparency.” Cultural Studies Review 9.1 (2003): 103-123.Orgad, Shani. Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pitts, Victoria. “Illness and Internet Empowerment: Writing and Reading Breast Cancer in Cyberspace.” Health 8.1 (2004): 33-59.Rothenberg, Matthew. “Weblogs, Metadata, and the Semantic Web”, paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Toronto, 16 Oct. 2003. ‹http://aoir.org/members/papers42/rothenberg_aoir.pdf›.Singer, Jessica, and George H.S. Singer. “Writing as Physical and Emotional Healing: Findings from Clinical Research.” Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text. Ed. Charles Bazerman. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008: 485-498. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor; And, AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin, 1991. Trigg, Stephanie. “Life Lessons.” Sunday Age, 10 June 2007. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wuthnow, Robert. Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.BlogsBrainhell. ‹http://brainhell.blogspot.com/›. rdavisjr. Prostate Cancer Journal. ‹http://pcjournal-rrd.blogspot.com/›. Sievers, Leroy. My Cancer. ‹http://www.npr.org/blogs/mycancer/›. Tom’s Road to Recovery. ‹http://tomsrecovery.blog.com/›. Trigg, Stephanie. Humanities Researcher. ‹http://stephanietrigg.blogspot.com/›.

Disclaimer: The situation on PixelCanvas is constantly changing due to raids from both sides. The figures in this article represent the state as of April 2020. In the politicized digital environment, the superiority of the alt-right’s weaponization of memes is often taken for granted. As summarized in the buzzword-phrase “the left can’t meme”, the digital engagements of self-identified leftist activists are usually seen as less effective than the ones of the right: their attempts at utilizing Internet culture described as too “politically correct” and “devoid of humour”. This supposedly “immutable law of the Internet” (Dankulous Memeulon) often found confirmation in research.Described by Phillips and Milner, Internet culture – “a highly insular clique”, now seeping into popular culture – is by design rooted in liberalism and fetishized sight. Through its principles of “free speech”, “harmless fun”, and dehumanizing detachment of memes from real-life production and consequence, meme-sharing was enabling deception, “bigoted pollution”, and reinforcing white racial frames, regardless of intentions (Phillips and Milner). From Andersson to Nagle, many come to the conclusion that the left’s presence online is simply not organized, not active, not transgressive enough to appeal to the sensibilities of Internet culture. Meanwhile, the playful, deceptive online engagements of the alt-right are found to be increasingly viral, set to recruit numerous young rebels, hence upholding a cultural hegemony which has already transcended over to the offline world. This online right style is one where a rejection of morality and nihilistic nonconformity reign supreme – all packaged in carnivalesque laughter and identity-bending “trolling” (Nagle 28-39). Even if counterculture and transgression used to be domains of the left, nowadays the nihilistic, fetishizing landscape of online humour is popularized via alt-right aligned message boards like 4chan (Nagle 28-39).Left-wing alternatives, encompassed by Nagle in the term “Tumblr liberalism”, were often described as “fragmented” through identitarianism and call-out-culture, enclosed in echo chambers, “nannying, language policing, and authoritarian” (68-85). This categorization has been rightfully criticized for reductionism that lumps together diverse political strands, focuses on form only, and omits the importance of subcultural logic in its caricature of the censorious left (Davies). However, it would be difficult to deny that this is exactly how the online left is, unfortunately, often perceived by the right and liberals/centrists alike, evidenced by its niche quality.The solutions to the problem of the right’s dominance in the memeosphere – and their Gramscian cultural hegemony – offered by Phillips and Milner could include disavowing fetishized sight while maintaining “slapdash, quippy, and Internet Ugly” qualities to deconstruct meme culture’s whiteness; Davies suggests that “if the left is to have the same degree of success in translating online cultures into political movements then it needs to understand both the online world and its own IRL history”.Nonetheless, some strands of the online left have been rather close in style and form to the ones of the alt-right, despite their clear difference of “stance” (Shifman 367). In this article, I demonstrate an example of a multi-faceted, united, witty, and countercultural meme leftism on PixelCanvas.io (PixelCanvas): a nearly unlimited online canvas, where anyone can place coloured pixels with an obligatory cooldown time after each. Intended for creative expression, PixelCanvas became a site of click-battles between organized dichotomous extremes of the left and the alt-right, and is swarmed with political imagery. The right’s use of this platform has been already examined by Thibault, well-fitting into the consensus about the efficiency of right-wing online activity. My focus is the rebuttal of alt-right imagery that the radical left replaces with their own.With a brief account of PixelCanvas’s affordances and recounting the recent history of its culture wars, I trace the hybrid leftist activity on PixelCanvas to argue that it is comparably grounded in dissimulation and transgression to the alt-right’s. Based on the case study, I explore how certain strands of online left might reappropriate the carnivalesque, deceptive, and countercultural meme culture sensibilities and forms, while simultaneously rejecting its “bigoted pollution” (Phillips and Milner) aspects. While arguably problematic, these new strategies might be necessary to combat the alt-right’s hegemony in the meme environment – and by extension, in popular culture.PixelCanvas as a Metapolitical Platform of Culture WarsPixelCanvas affords a blend of 4chan-style open-access, no-login anonymity and the importance of organized collective effort. As described by Thibault, it is an “online ‘game’ that allows players to colour pixels ..., either collaborating or competing for the control of the shared space” (102). The obligatory cooldown period on PixelCanvas results in most of the works requiring either dedication of long periods of time or collaboration: as such, the majority of canvas art has a “shared authorship” (102). As a space for creative expression, PixelCanvas encourages expressing aspects of genuine personal identity (political views, sexuality, etc.) albeit reduced to symbols and memes that rarely remain personal. Although the primary medium of information transfer on the platform is visual, brief written catchphrases are also utilized. While the canvas is not lacking in free areas, competition for space is prevalent: between political viewpoints, nationalist groups (Bakalım), and other communities (PixelCanvas.io).Given this setup, it might be expected that battling for hegemony took over the game. The affordances of PixelCanvas as accepting anonymous unmoderated expressions of identity/political views encourage dissimulation similarly to boards such as 4chan; its immediate visual/one-liner focus overlaps with the prerequisites of meme culture. Meanwhile, the game’s competition aspect leads to large-scale organization of polarized metapolitical groups and to imagery that is increasingly larger, more taboo-breaking, and playful: meant to catch the eye of a viewer before the opponents do. PixelCanvas, as such, is a platform fitting into transgressive, trolling, fetishizing, and “liberal” affordances of Internet culture: the same affordances that made it, according to Nagle or Phillips and Milner, into a space of desensitized white supremacy and right-wing dominance.Such a setup may seem to work in favour of the 4chan-style raids and against the supposed identitarianism of “Tumblr liberalism”. One could recall the importance of united collective efforts on 4chan: from meme-sharing to Gamergate raids (Beran). Meanwhile, suggested by Citarella, a problem of the online left is its fragmentation, and its “poorly organized and smaller followings” (10). As he observed on Politigram, “DemSocs, Syndicalists, ML’s, AnComs, … and so on, all hated each other. The online right was equally divided but managed to coordinate cultural agitations” (Citarella 10).Indeed, the platform displayed the effects of alt-right virality multiple times, involving creations of self-identified Kekistanis (KnowYourMeme), anarcho-capitalists, 4chan-aligned “bronies” (My Little Pony fans), etc. However, since 2017, the left joined the game, becoming another example of a united, well-organized and strongly participatory group, which continuously resists alt-right attacks and establishes its own raids, often gaining an upper hand.Named “Battle of Pixelgrad”, the influx of leftist activity began to combat the forming Reich Iron Cross posted by “a user on 4chan's /pol/” which has caught the attention of Leftbook/meme groups and subreddits (PLK Wiki) (Wrigley). The groups involved spanned “all beliefs under a unified socialist umbrella” (Pixel Liberation Front) ranging from communism through anarchism subtypes to identity politics: all associating with the “left unity” flag that they replaced the Iron Cross with. Their efforts against alt-right raids were coordinated through Discord servers and a public Facebook group. Soon, a Facebook page for Left Unity Fighting Front (LUFF) was set up, with the PixelCanvas flag in the banner and the description: “We decided to form the new rival of 4chan, LUFF. We are the new united front of the internet. Promoting left unity, trolling Nazis, and taking on sectarianism.”Figure 1: The ’Left Unity’ flag. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1554,3594.The concept of left unity has been criticised before, as one that would lead to “the co-optation of anarchism under a Marxist leadership”, charged with the history of anarchist-Bolshevik clashes in USSR, and marred by a “lack of willingness among some Marxists to actually engage with anarchists in legitimate debate” (Springer). Still, the PixelCanvas left unity is one of the rare instances of Marxist, anarchist, and other leftist online groups working together on rather equal grounds, without cracking down on discourse and historical contexts: which is afforded by a subcultural logic and focus on combating a common enemy. The PixelCanvas leftists support common projects, readily bending their beliefs/ identity to create an efficient community that can resist 4chan: self-identifying as an “allyship” with anonymous “soldiers”/comrades belonging together on the left side of the pixel “war” (Pixel Liberation Front). While the diversity of their beliefs is made clear through the variously aligned flags/thinkers they choose to represent with pixels, the union stands without in-fighting, emulating simplistic versions of history as a dichotomous struggle between left and right (which deliberately rejects centrism): from Nazi/communist battles to Cold War imagery. Although reductionist, this us/them thinking is especially necessary in the visual, time-sensitive, and competitive space of PixelCanvas. No matter how extreme the common projects are, what matters in the pixel war is camaraderie and defeating the enemy in the most striking manner possible. After all, the setup of the platform (and the immediacy of Internet culture) supports attention- grabbing transgression and memes better than nuanced discourse. Figure 2: Representation of the left uniting against Nazism and anarcho-capitalism. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-143,-782.As of April 2020, hardly any Nazi/4chan/ancap imagery on PixelCanvas stands without being challenged by the Left Unity. Although some of the groups involved in Pixelgrad do not exist anymore, Discord servers (e.g. RedPixel) and Pixel Liberation Front (PLF) Facebook group remain, defending the platform from continued raids. These coordinating bodies are easily accessible to anyone willing to contribute (shall one wish for complete anonymity, they are also free to participate without joining the servers). Their efforts could be understood as “clicktivism” (Halupka); however, the involved leftists view it as a “war” (PLF) or “Memeolution” (Wrigley), an important way in which the “virality of right-wing populism” (Thibault) must be resisted. This use of language highlights their serious awareness of the need for combating the right’s digital hegemony, no matter how playful their activity seems.Even if this phenomenon is specific to PixelCanvas, one should acknowledge that the identity-bending unity of the left has been enough to challenge continued raids. Niche practices, as seen through 4chan, might break into the mainstream: according to Hobson and Modi, online spaces “are a rich recruiting ground for previously antithetical/apolitical young people” (345) who find refuge in memes and trolling. The agenda of the PixelCanvas left (counterplatforming activism) in this case differs from 4chan’s. However, the forms they assume to reach their goal are often “pithy, funny, or particularly striking” enough to potentially make one “pause to think, and/or laugh” (Hobson and Modi 345) regardless of political alignment.The Form, Content, and Stance of PixelCanvas Left ActivityDespite the unity in the organization of the PixelCanvas left, the approaches/strategies of its various pixel artworks are far from uniform. At the first sight, the creations of RedPixel members already appear as a multi-faceted (and potentially confusing) mixture of serious real-life agenda and playful Internet culture. Guided by Shifman’s communication-oriented typology of memes, I analyze the different “contents, forms, and stances” (367) that the PixelCanvas left displays in its creations. For analytical clarity, I distinguish three main approaches which overlap and play various roles in contributing to the collective image of RedPixel as simultaneously activist, serious, inclusive, and Internet-culture-savvy, transgressive, deceptive.The first approach of PixelCanvas leftist creations is most serious and least grounded in Internet culture. A portion of RedPixel activity directly reproduces real-life protest chants, posters, flags, murals, movement symbols, and portraits of leftist icons, with little alteration to the form other than pixelating. The contents of such creations vary, however, they remain serious and focused on real-life issues: voicing support for contemporary leftist movements (Black Lives Matter, pro-refugee, Rojava liberation, etc.), celebrating the countercultural, class-centric leftist history (anarchist, communist, socialist victories, thinkers, and revolutionaries), and representing a plethora of identities within hyper-inclusive flag clusters (of various sexualities, genders, and ethnicities). The stance of these images can be plausibly interpreted as charged with serious/genuine “keying” (Shifman 367), and “conative” (imperative) or “emotive” (367) functions. Within those images, the meme culture’s problematic affordances (“fetishization” and “liberalism” (Phillips and Milner)) are disavowed clearly: exemplified by a banner on the site suggesting that “just a meme” mentality created a shield for “meme Nazis” that led to the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting. Although this strand of RedPixel’s works could be criticized as “humourless” and rather detached from the platform’s affordances, its role lies in displaying the connection to the real world with potential suggestions for mobilization, the awareness of meme culture’s problematic nature, and the image of radical left cooperation. Figure 3: The Christchurch memorial. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2815,3321. Figure 4: Posters and symbols in support of Rojava, Palestine liberation, and Black Lives Matter. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@5340,4121. Figure 5: Early Paris Commune poster reproduced on PixelCanvas. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@7629,2134. Figure 6: Example of a PixelCanvas hyper-inclusive flag cluster. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@2741,-3508.The second approach, while similar in the diversity of content, adopts memetic forms, and the light-hearted “harmless fun” of Internet culture. Through popular meme formats (molded to call for action), slang expressions, pop-cultural references (anime/cartoon/video game characters), to adopting “cutesy” aesthetics, these creations present identity politics, anti-fascism, and anti-capitalism in a light, aestheticized form. Popular characters, colourful art, and repetitive base colour schemes (red, black, rainbow) are likely to attract attention; recognition of the pop-cultural references, and of known meme formats might sustain it, urging one to focus on the only uncertain element: the politics behind it. Being visually and contextually appealing to online youth, this political-memetic imagery is well-adapted to the platform. Simultaneously, the carnivalesque forms contrast with the frequently more transgressive contents this approach employs. As a result, the tone of their work seems lighthearted even in its incitement to “kill the Nazis” and “eat the rich”. Clearly aware of the language of its opposition, RedPixel reacts similarly to how 4chan reacted to Tumblr liberalism: responding to “lightly thrown accusations” (Nagle) by intensifying them to the point where they can be seen as “owning” the labels they have been given – instead of “getting offended”. Through memes and reappropriated posters they present themselves as “Red Menace,” as a direct threat to 4channers, and as a “trigger-warning” club, using the existing criticisms to self-identify as formidable enemies of the right. While the transgression in RedPixel style often remains acceptable by radical left standards, it is certainly not the same as “virtue signalling”, “hypersensitive”, “vulnerable” Tumblr liberalism (Nagle 68–85); and it might be shocking or amoral to some. Much of their imagery is provocative: inciting violence, glorifying deeply problematic parts of communist history, using religious symbols in a potentially blasphemous way, supporting occultism/ Satanism, and explicitly amplifying (queer) sexuality. In the mix of (sometimes) extreme contents and forms that suggest a light-hearted attitude, it might be difficult to determine the keying of their stance. Although it is unlikely that RedPixel would avow politics they do not actually believe (given the activist, anti-fetishizing agenda of their first approach), their political choices are frequently amplified to their full “tankie” form, and even up to Stalin support: raising the question how much of it is serious intent masked with humour, and what could be written off as deliberate identity play, deceptive “trolling” and jokes, similar in style to 4chan’s. Figure 7: Revolution-inciting appropriation of a popular meme format. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1765,3376. Figure 8: Fictional characters Stevonnie (Steven Universe) and Cirno (Touhou) with leftist captions. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-847,-748. Figure 9: Call for fighting fascism referencing a Pacman video game and Karl Marx. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-712,-395. Figure 10: Joseph Stalin reimagined as a My Little Pony character. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1197,966. Figure 11: “A spectre is haunting Kekistan.” Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2196,3248. Figure 12: “Trigger Warning Gun Club” badge. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@2741,-3508.Figure 13: “Have you heard that Nazis get vored?” anime catgirl. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@1684,928. Figure 14: Rainbow genitals on a former Kekistan flag. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2513,3221. Figure 15: “Eat the Rich — OK Boomer” wizard ghost. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-4390,-697.The third approach can be read as a subset of the second: however, what distinguishes it is a clearly parodic stance and reappropriating of 4chan’s forms. The PixelCanvas activists, unlike the supposed “anti-free speech” left (Lukianoff and Haidt) do not try to get the alt-right imagery removed by others, and do not fully erase it. Instead, they repurpose 4chan memes and flags, ridiculing them or making them stand for leftist views. An unaware viewer could mistake their parodies of 4chan for parodies of the left made by 4chaners; the true stance sometimes only suggested by their placement within RedPixel-reclaimed areas. Communist and LGBTQ+ Pepes or Ponies, modified Kekistan flags, and even claiming that “the right can’t meme” all point to an interesting trend that instead of banning symbols associated with alt-right groups wants to exploit the malleability of memes: confusing and parodying their original content and stance while maintaining the form and style. This aim is perhaps best exemplified in the image The Greatest Game of Capture the Flag where Pepes in anarcho-communist, communist, and transgender Pride hoodies are escaping from a crying white man while carrying a 4chan flag. Interpreted in context, this image summarizes the new direction that leftists take against 4chan. This is a direction of left unity (with various strands of radical left maintaining their identities but establishing an overarching collective “allyship” identification), of mixing identity politics with classic ideologies, of reconciling Internet culture with IRL socio-political awareness, and finally, of reappropriating proven-effective play, dissimulation, and transgression from 4chan. Figure 16: Pride flag cluster with Pride-coloured Pepes. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1599,3516. Figure 17: Communist/anarchist thinkers and leaders reimagined as Pepes. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1885,3203. Figure 18: “The Right Can’t Meme.” Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1885,3203. Figure 19: The reclaimed Kekistan area. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2439,3210. Figure 20: “The Greatest Game of Capture the Flag.” Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1885,3203.ConclusionThe PixelCanvas left can serve as an example of a united stronghold which managed to counterplatform the alt-right: assuming dominance in 2017 to later rebuild and expand their pixel spheres of influence after each 4chan raid. Online culture wars are nowadays recognized as Gramscian in their roots: according to Burton, “the young people confronting this reactionary shift head-on with memes normalizing are … on the front lines of a culture war with global repercussions” (13). By far, this “war” for digital hegemony has been overwhelmingly evaluated as one that the alt-right is simply better at, due to the natural affordances of Internet culture. However, the “united front of the internet” “promoting left unity and trolling Nazis” (LUFF) exemplifies a possible direction which the online radical left could follow to take on 4chan’s digital dominance. This direction is complex and hybrid: with overlapping/combined approaches. The activities of PixelCanvas left include practices that are well-adapted to the immediate meme culture and those based on IRL movements; practices similar to 4chan’s problematic transgression and those that are activist, disavowing fetishized sight; serious practices and deceptive/ironic ones. Their 2017 PixelCanvas victory and later resistance persisting despite continuing raids might suggest that this strategy works, with the key to its coordination laying in the subcultural logic of an “allyship” that privileges fast-paced mobilization and swift comebacks over careful nuance: necessitated by meme culture affordances. Although only time can prove if this new left digital language will become more widespread, it has the potential to become an alternative to “hypersensitive Tumblr liberalism” and to challenge the idea that meme culture is doomed to be right-wing.ReferencesAndersson, Linus. “No Digital ‘Castles in the Air’: Online Non-Participation and the Radical Left.” Media and Communication 4.4 (2016): 53–62.Bakalım, Seyret. “Pixel io Türkiye vs Brezilya [Turkey vs Brazil] Pixel War.” YouTube, 23 June 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsPHVNpB8Hg>.Beran, Dale. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.” Medium, 14 Feb. 2017. <https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb>.Burton, Julian. “Look at Us, We Have Anxiety: Youth, Memes, and the Power of Online Cultural Politics.” Journal of Childhood Studies 44.3 (2019): 3–17.Dankulous Memeulon. “The Left Can’t Meme.” UrbanDictionary, 11 May 2018. <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Left%20can%27t%20Meme>.Davies, Josh. “Tumblr Liberalism’ vs the Serious Authentic Left: On Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies.” Ceasefire Magazine, 8 Sep. 2017. <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/tumblr-liberalism-authentic-left-review-kill-normies/>.Halupka, Max. “Clicktivism: A Systematic Heuristic.” Policy & Internet 6.2 (2014): 115–32.Hobson, Thomas, and Kaajal Modi. “Socialist Imaginaries and Queer Futures: Memes as Sites of Collective Imagining.” Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production. 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