Journal articles on the topic 'Amusement parks United States History'

Simulation experiences captivate the imagination of today's entertainment-seeking public. Once located exclusively at a few venues, these simulations are increasingly prevalent in a variety of locales including malls and casinos. While today's public may view these entertainments as novel, these forms of simulation have rich historical antecedents that can be traced to entertainment and technological innovations of the nineteenth century. Focusing on American examples from the time period of 1820 to the present, this paper examines a wide variety of immersive entertainments that attempted to simulate an experience, environment, or event so realistically that viewers accepted the imitation as authentic and realistic. This paper examines cycloramas, panoramas, historic recreations, and a selection of mechanical rides from amusement parks and world's fair midways that provided group experiences. An examination of the social functions of these precursors strengthens our understanding of the significance of contemporary simulation entertainments in the United States.

Cultural industry park is an important carrier of cultural industry development. The development of the cultural industry should not neglect the study of the history and process of the construction of cultural industrial parks. This article tries to comb out the experience which can be used for reference through the history of the formation and development of the two major cultural industry parks in the United States. On the basis of the advantages of its own traditional culture, we should grasp the trend and frontier of the development of the world culture industry, absorb and learn from the successful experience of foreign countries, and constantly improve the development level of Tianjin culture industry.

In the spring of 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I and adopted universal, male, military conscription, American war resisters and draft dodgers known at the time as “the slackers” began to arrive in Mexico. Senator Albert Bacon Fall claimed there were 30,000 slackers hiding out in Mexico, and slacker Linn A.E. Gale agreed with him. When American adventurer, reporter and writer Harry L. Foster passed through Mexico City in 1919, he noted that there were hundreds of Americans, many of them slackers, loitering in the city’s parks and plazas.

This article examines the potential use of dinosaur parks to reassess the relationship between humans and the environment. These sites have been developed across Europe and the United States over the course of the last century and have been neglected as sites of public history and environmental heritage. Within the guided trails where visitors interact with model or animatronic re-creations of animals that were extinct millions of years ago, a process of transformation takes place as individuals are required to rethink humanity’s place in the vast timescale of the Earth’s history and the fate of our own species in the context of climate change. Methods of affective engagement within the dinosaur parks serve as a tool to understand how natural history can be presented to the wider public as a means of changing attitudes and ideals. As we enter into the Anthropocene and we face environmental threats caused by human activity, it is the confrontation with the dinosaurs that can alter our present and our future on the planet.

In the late nineteenth century, camp meeting towns were a common feature of the American landscape. The boards of Methodist ministers and laity overseeing these towns adopted management and planning strategies drawn from movements for romantic suburbs, sanitary reform, and urban parks. The strategies these Methodists adopted represent a practice of vernacular planning crafted decades before the professionalization of the discipline in the United States. Analysis of the planning history of two sites—Ocean Grove, NJ, and Round Lake, NY—reveals factors shaping this development of Methodistic town planning.

Present understanding of fire ecology in forests subject to surface fires is based on fire-scar evidence. We present theory and empirical results that suggest that fire-history data have uncertainties and biases when used to estimate the population mean fire interval (FI) or other parameters of the fire regime. First, the population mean FI is difficult to estimate precisely because of unrecorded fires and can only be shown to lie in a broad range. Second, the interval between tree origin and first fire scar estimates a real fire-free interval that warrants inclusion in mean-FI calculations. Finally, inadequate sampling and targeting of multiple-scarred trees and high scar densities bias mean FIs toward shorter intervals. In ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex P. & C. Laws.) forests of the western United States, these uncertainties and biases suggest that reported mean FIs of 2-25 years significantly underestimate population mean FIs, which instead may be between 22 and 308 years. We suggest that uncertainty be explicitly stated in fire-history results by bracketing the range of possible population mean FIs. Research and improved methods may narrow the range, but there is no statistical or other method that can eliminate all uncertainty. Longer mean FIs in ponderosa pine forests suggest that (i) surface fire is still important, but less so in maintaining forest structure, and (ii) some dense patches of trees may have occurred in the pre-Euro-American landscape. Creation of low-density forest structure across all parts of ponderosa pine landscapes, particularly in valuable parks and reserves, is not supported by these results.

Black women's struggles for authority and identity are underreported not only within the political and social living days of the territory black females call home (for example, dark skin females), yet also in critical and creative literary works. Suzan-Lori Parks [1963-] – for her willingness to bring authority to black females who really are silenced. In her work, she attempted to demonstrate how racial identity, privilege, and sex all play a role in black female's oppression in United states. Because they are black, poor, and women, the [female] main characters in her work seem to be victims. Suzan-Lori Parks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who is bold and untraditional. She is part of a larger line of African American playwrights who have made a significant contribution to African Americans' quest/ion – for identities. Her drama are places where she highlights the importance of restructuring African Americans' identities by challenging dominant ideologies and metanarratives, invalidating some of the prejudices forced on them, exposing the press's duplicity in reinforcing racial prejudice, engendering enslavement, lynching, and their aftermaths, rehistoricizing history, catalyzing reflections on the numerous intersections of physical intimacy, racial group, category, and sex role sexualities, and profess. The search for one's identity has been a contentious topic in African American literature since its inception. Dark skin playwrights have made considerable efforts in the drama to emphasize the worth, significance, and self respect of African American women identities by combating racism and its harmful impacts on African Americans' lives and relationships.

This paper describes and assesses Richard Haag’s controversial campaign to create Seattle’s Gas Works Park. Haag’s plan is significant in the history of environmental aesthetics, because it was the first to preserve remnants of industrial heritage in a United States city park, and because Haag appealed to aesthetics when making his case. I argue Haag’s campaign was persuasive, and I claim the former gas works now function within the park in much the same way as the ruins of parks of previous centuries. And because the structures are now ruins, they do not sanctify the destructive function they used to have. Finally, I claim that human intervention in abandoned, derelict, or post-industrial sites can be worthwhile if it successfully conveys a change in use or function of those sites, thus bringing beauty out of blight.

Municipal leaders are pursuing ambitious goals to increase urban tree canopy (UTC), but there is little understanding of the pace and socioecological drivers of UTC change. We analyzed land cover change in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (United States) from 1970–2010 to examine the impacts of post-industrial processes on UTC. We interpreted land cover classes using aerial imagery and assessed historical context using archival newspapers, agency reports, and local historical scholarship. There was a citywide UTC increase of +4.3 percentage points. Substantial UTC gains occurred in protected open spaces related to both purposeful planting and unintentional forest emergence due to lack of maintenance, with the latter phenomenon well-documented in other cities located in forested biomes. Compared to developed lands, UTC was more persistent in protected open spaces. Some neighborhoods experienced substantial UTC gains, including quasi-suburban areas and depopulated low-income communities; the latter also experienced decreasing building cover. We identified key processes that drove UTC increases, and which imposed legacies on current UTC patterns: urban renewal, urban greening initiatives, quasi-suburban developments, and (dis)investments in parks. Our study demonstrates the socioecological dynamism of intra-city land cover changes at multi-decadal time scales and the crucial role of local historical context in the interpretation of UTC change.

The legalization of cannabis has necessitated a debate about the specific public or private places in which the consumption of cannabis should be lawfully allowed. Relevant federal, and state or provincial, laws governing the public consumption of cannabis as of April 2020 were retrieved through primary legal research in LexisNexis and official government websites. Across various states and provinces within the United States and Canada, three types of cannabis-related regulatory regimes have emerged. Quebec has adopted the most restrictive type of regulatory framework. Quebec generally prohibits the smoking or vaping of cannabis in both indoor and outdoor public places, by extending the restrictions on the use of tobacco and alcohol products to cannabis consumption. Slightly less restrictive are jurisdictions such as Ontario and British Columbia, which allow cannabis consumption in most outdoor public spaces, such as streets or parks. Certain local-level jurisdictions within the US states of California and Colorado have adopted the least restrictive local-level regulatory regime, by authorizing the operation of indoor cannabis consumption sites at certain fixed locations or within mobile spaces. The degree to which private consumption is allowed or prohibited also varies widely. An individual who lives or works in a jurisdiction such as Quebec that has prohibited the smoking or vaping of cannabis in almost all public places will be left with limited spaces in which to consume inhalable cannabis products. By contrast, a non-medical cannabis user who lives in Colorado, which authorizes on-site consumption at certain licensed establishments, has far more options to consume inhalable cannabis outside of the home. In this article, we will examine a range of federal-, state- or provincial-, and local-level laws that regulate cannabis consumption in certain public and private places and consider some of the potential public health and safety implications of these laws.

Fire management in protected areas faces mounting obstacles as climate change alters disturbance regimes, resources are diverted to fighting wildfires, and more people live along the boundaries of parks. Evidence-based prescribed fire management and improved communication with stakeholders is vital to reducing fire risk while maintaining public trust. Numerous national fire databases document when and where natural, prescribed, and human-caused fires have occurred on public lands in the United States. However, these databases are incongruous and non-standardized, making it difficult to visualize spatiotemporal patterns of fire and engage stakeholders in decision-making. We created interactive decision analytics (“VISTAFiRe”) that transform fire history data into clear visualizations of the spatial and temporal dimensions of fire and its management. We demonstrate the utility of our approach using Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park as examples of protected areas experiencing fire regime change between 1980 and 2017. Our open source visualizations may be applied to any data from the National Park Service Wildland Fire Events Geodatabase, with flexibility to communicate shifts in fire regimes over time, such as the type of ignition, duration and magnitude, and changes in seasonal occurrence. Application of the tool to Everglades and Big Cypress revealed that natural wildfires are occurring earlier in the wildfire season, while human-caused and prescribed wildfires are becoming less and more common, respectively. These new avenues of stakeholder communication are allowing the National Park Service to devise research plans to prepare for environmental change, guide resource allocation, and support decision-making in a clear and timely manner.

Public gardens, including public parks, botanical gardens, and arboreta are significant tourism destinations with increasingly popular appeal. In the United States alone, the number of gardens is continuing to rise impressively. Undeniably, there is a need for trained and educated horticulturists who can enter the horticulture industry, specifically in the area of public garden management. At the Univ. of Florida, a new course, ORH 4932, Public Gardens was offered. This course was designed with a field trip emphasis to help students visually understand and appreciate the value and diversity of such gardens. Students taking the course had an opportunity to visit and tour various gardens throughout the state of Florida. At the same time, students learned about the history, management, collections, and importance of such institutions to society. This session will explore the value of student experiences in the learning process, present an overview of how to develop a field trip class, and provide information to other educators interested in offering such a course.

This study traces the development and evolution of Snake River use and management through an in-depth exploration of historic commercial scenic river guiding and concessions on the upper Snake River in Grand Teton National Park (GRTE) from 1950 to the present day. The research is based on a combination of methods including archival research, oral history analysis, historical landscape analysis, and fieldwork. I suggest that a distinct cultural community of river runners and outdoor recreationalists developed in Grand Teton National Park after World War II. In GRTE, a combination of physical, cultural, and technical forces shaped this community’s evolution including the specific geomorphology and dynamic channel patterns of the upper Snake River, the individuals and groups that worked on this river, and changes in boat and gear technology over time. The following paper presents the early results from the first year of this project in 2016 including the work of a graduate student and myself. This study offers connections between the upper Snake River and Grand Teton National Park to broader national trends in the evolution of outdoor recreation and concessions in national parks, the impact of World War II on technological developments for boating, and the cultural history of adventure outdoor recreation and tourism in the United States. Featured photo by Elton Menefee on Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/AHgCFeg-gXg

Until recently, the history of environmentalism was primarily a history of attention to place. In the United States, environmentalists have gotten rather good at protecting and managing particular places such as mountains, forests, and watersheds and specific resources such as trees, soil, wildlife, air, and water. Environmentalism has become an enormously popular social movement, with, by some measures, more than 80 percent of Americans considering themselves environmentalists. Thousands of organizations, ranging from local volunteer groups to national nonprofits, address issues as diverse as open space, air and water pollution, biological diversity, environmental justice, and environmental effects on human health. The successes of this movement have been striking. Our National Parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas are touted as models for the world and are well complemented by state, municipal, and private protected areas. The Endangered Species Act successfully resolves many conflicts between rare creatures and development. Rivers have been cleaned up, and once-spurned urban waterfronts now draw real estate and tourism development. Americans drink cleaner water and breathe cleaner air than much of the rest of the world, and attempts to weaken regulatory frameworks are consistently met with public disapproval.

This case study analyzes the potential impacts of weakening the National Park Service’s (NPS) “9B Regulations” enacted in 1978, which established a federal regulatory framework governing hydrocarbon rights and extraction to protect natural resources within the parks. We focus on potential risks to national parklands resulting from Executive Orders 13771—Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs [1]—and 13783—Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth [2]—and subsequent recent revisions and further deregulation. To establish context, we briefly overview the history of the United States NPS and other relevant federal agencies’ roles and responsibilities in protecting federal lands that have been set aside due to their value as areas of natural beauty or historical or cultural significance [3]. We present a case study of Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP) situated within the Bakken Shale Formation—a lucrative region of oil and gas deposits—to examine potential impacts if areas of TRNP, particularly areas designated as “wilderness,” are opened to resource extraction, or if the development in other areas of the Bakken near or adjacent to the park’s boundaries expands [4]. We have chosen TRNP because of its biodiversity and rich environmental resources and location in the hydrocarbon-rich Bakken Shale. We discuss where federal agencies’ responsibility for the protection of these lands for future generations and their responsibility for oversight of mineral and petroleum resources development by private contractors have the potential for conflict.

This essay explores the reasons that Franklin Park in Boston, Massachusetts, failed to fulfill the high expectations of its designer, Frederick Law Olmsted. The fate of Olmsted's lofty goals in Boston is revealing because it sheds light upon his thought and work, on the historic development of the urban park in the United States, and on the significance of the movement for public parks as a turn-of-the-century reform effort. In 1886 Olmsted presented his plan for Franklin Park, the crucial component of Boston's new park system. Influenced by Ruskin and others, Olmsted held that contemplation of the park's vistas of rolling lawns would reverse the debilitating effects of city life. The success of Franklin Park, he felt, depended upon sequestering the Country Park section of the scheme and protecting it from noisy, crowded, and athletic activities. Olmsted's choice of the "beautiful" style of landscape without visual centers of interest allowed local golfers, bicyclists, and baseball players in the 1890s to shape Franklin Park's pleasant but empty-looking spaces for their own uses. Then, in 1910, the park commissioners added ornate flower displays and a wild animal zoo, both ideas that Olmsted had explicitly condemned. The alternative uses of the park were accepted because they were promoted by powerful groups of middle-class and upper-middle-class Bostonians and because their proponents claimed for them the same properties of mental, physical, and moral improvement that Olmsted claimed for his peaceful park scenery.

This study combines historical and quantitative methods to determine the market response to a major nineteenth century American urban architectural form-the speculatively built row house. The paper estimates a hedonic price index which decomposes the original purchase price of the row house into a set of prices for the characteristics of the house, including detailed architectural features. In turn, the estimated prices for the architectural features reveal the market's response to the aesthetic design. With more than 3,500 row houses, its tree-lined streets, and scattered parks, Boston's South End is the largest Victorian residential district remaining in the United States. The homogeneity of the brick bowfront row house form, coupled with the variety of architectural features, provides an unusual opportunity to test the effect of architecture on market values. We find that variables for lot size, house size, and location within the neighborhood explain 74 percent of the price of a row house. Architectural style and features account for an additional 14 percent of the price of the house and are more highly valued when they differentiate a row house from its neighbors. These are significant results, for they provide systematic statistical evidence that architectural design matters in the marketplace. "But tell me: When you say; 'The value of a building,' do you really lay more stress on the subjective value than the dollar value?" "On both. For human nature determines that subjective value, sooner or later, becomes money value; and the lack of it, sooner or later, money loss. The subjective value is far higher, by far the more permanent; but money value is inseparable from the affairs of life; to ignore it would be moonshine."

Population genetic baselines for species perceived to be at-risk are crucial for monitoring population trends and making well-informed management decisions. We characterized the genetic status of a population of Gila monsters (Heloderma suspectum), a large venomous lizard native to deserts of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, by sampling 100 individuals in Sonoran Desert upland habitat at Saguaro National Park, Arizona, USA. We used 18 microsatellite markers, along with 1195 bp of sequence data from the mitochondrial DNA 12S locus, to examine genetic diversity, estimate effective population size, and assess demographic history. Despite suburban development adjacent to the study area, we observed high genetic diversity with uninhibited gene flow within this protected population. We estimated effective population size (Ne) for the total sample area (80 km2) using the linkage disequilibrium method in NeEstimator to be 94 individuals (95% confidence interval: 80.7-111.2). In 2011, we used capture-recapture methods to estimate that 80 adult Gila monsters (95% CI = 37-225) inhabited the area along the 14-km transect that we surveyed most frequently; probability of detecting resident Gila monsters during surveys was <0.01, highlighting the challenges of studying the species. Despite being considered an elusive and thus potentially rare species, these data reveal that in this protected environment the population appears healthy and robust. The results provide an important genetic baseline for future studies and monitoring, and exemplify the success of protective population measures in National Parks and under Arizona state laws.

Israel was the first state in the Middle East to recognize the independence of the PRC, but full-fl edged diplomatic relations between the two countries were established only in 1992. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the interaction between the two countries has been in the nature of military-technical cooperation, and in the 1990s it acquired a new dimension. After the confl ict between the United States and Israel in the late 1990s and early 2000s, due to the alleged transfer by Israel to the PRC of technical means created on the basis of American technologies, military-technical cooperation between China and Israel stopped. Nevertheless, the cooperation continues to develop. The PRC is beginning to actively invest in high-tech Israeli companies, as well as attract Israeli investors to national innovation (technology) parks in China, which corresponds to the long-term goals of the PRC in the fi eld of scientifi c and technological development. In addition, the two countries are currently dynamically cooperating in the fi eld of infrastructure investments, which not only improves Israel’s logistics potential, but also creates facilities that in the future will become an integral part of the global Chinese project "One Belt and One Road".

The article is devoted to the functional-stylistic analysis of the new genre of Ukrainian television news – infotainment. The author emphasizes that this genre is currently actively developing in the field of national television. In addition, it has a number of specific features inherent only to it. On the example of the TV program "Абзац!" on the New Channel and "M1 News" on the M1 channel the author provides an analysis of the broadcasting media specifics in the television programs of the infotainment genre. Infotainment – literally "infotainment = information + entertainment" – is a diffuse genre, which emerged as functional mix of two genres – informational and entertainment. The essence of the infotainment news is laying in the presentation of official news in an amusement way. The history of infotainment establishment is related not only to the globalization of television, but also to the change in information space paradigm in general. This genre emerged in the American mediaspace in the 80's of the 20th century and, with the help of the globalization process, gradually expanded its borders therefore it became popular outside the United States. In addition, the infotainment changed its format to the needs of the Ukrainian viewer that gave it the unique features that distinguish this genre not only among other types of news, but also among similar foreign prototypes. Among such features the author distinguish: conversational style of speech, the use of a large number of stylistic trails, the irony of discourse, emotional and expressive presentation of the material, versatility of the video and the free choice of thematic content. Due to these features, the Ukrainian infotainment as neo-genre is gaining popularity among recipients. As a result, it was proved that the infotainment exists on the Ukrainian television and has its own linguistic and stylistic features that require attention not only from journalists, but also by linguists, in particular medialinguists. The bright example of studied programs shows that such a genre enriches not only the content of the television media space, but also the language of the recipients by the innovative lexical units.

Rhododendron species cultivation has a long history in northern Italy, where a wide selection of cultivars and hybrids is grown. In spring 2001, a previously unknown bud blast was observed on several rhododendron cultivars growing in gardens and parks in the Province of Biella, Italy. Flower petioles and twigs, but not leaves, showed extensive necrosis, and flower production was reduced. The first symptoms on infected flower buds are brown necrotic areas near the base, which increase in size until the whole bud appears brown and water-soaked. Infected buds shrink, but do not rot or disintegrate, and remain on the bush. Coremia (2.0 mm high and 0.5 mm wide), which appeared as black specks on outer bud scales, produced large numbers of spherical spores apically that measured 3.6 to 5.5 μm in diameter. The fungus Pycnostysanus azaleae (1) was consistently isolated after disinfested infected buds (1 min in 5.15% commercial NaOCl solution) were cultured on potato dextrose agar amended with streptomycin sulfate at 100 mg/liter. Pathogenicity of three isolates of P. azaleae was confirmed by inoculating with a spore suspension 30 buds of 2 rhododendron plants (cv. Rosso scuro grande tardiva) grown in containers (14 cm diameter). Buds were punctured with a sterile needle before inoculation. Noninoculated plants served as controls. Wounded buds were covered with plastic bags to maintain high relative humidity, and all plants were maintained in growth chambers at 20°C for 9 days, and then transferred outdoors where temperatures were 20 to 25°C. Inoculated plants developed typical bud symptoms 20 days after inoculation, with 80% of inoculated buds showing symptoms. Control plants remained symptomless. The pathogen was consistently reisolated from artificially inoculated plants. In garden observations, different cultivars showed a wide range of susceptibility to the pathogen, mainly related to their flowering period. To our knowledge, this is the first report of the presence of P. azaleae in Italy. Outbreaks of P. azaleae were previously reported in the United States (1), United Kingdom (2), and Germany (3). References: (1) W. H. Davis. Phytopathology 29:517, 1939. (2) P. J. Howell and R. K. S. Wood. Ann. Appl. Biol. 50:723, 1962. (3) W. Schmalscheidt. Immergrune Blater 26:35, 1985.

Amusement parks have increased in popularity around the world, with attendance escalating to more than 15 million people each year. In addition to the United States, Japan and European countries are currently developing parks, featuring amusement rides and water slides. Today, I will discuss the design and maintenance criteria of amusement park rides and waterpark slides, as well as the protection by the authority with local jurisdiction of the public from construction to operation. I will also cite typical cases which reinforce the need for requirements and standards,

This comparative transnational history informed by discourse analysis examines the US and UK news coverage of two new ‘federal startups’ created in the early 2010s: The United States Digital Service and Government Digital Service. These agencies were designed to renovate federal infrastructures and institutions by integrating technologies and technologists into the federal government. Early coverage of these agencies in both countries focused on the integration of casual dress norms common in technology industries into federal offices dominated by suits. In the United States, those norms were embraced, often with amusement. But in the United Kingdom, they were met with hostility. This article explains why dress code was a focus in both countries and why it was covered differently in each. Ultimately, this study argues workplace attire is emblematic of the differing ways in which industry and government partnerships function in these countries. Dress code norm differences offer a window into how nationally specific cultural values remained about technology and government in each country. Ultimately, these findings suggest the extent to which values prioritized by technology industries became those prioritized by the US government, and the extent to which the United Kingdom retained separation between those arenas.

Advancements in biotechnology are recognized as one of the most important scientific achievements of the 20th Century. The emergence of biotechnology profoundly impacted the health of the world, and the economic vitality of regions where bio clusters and bioresearch parks grew. This article explores some of the historical and policy implications undergirding this development in the United States and the importance of alignment of life science research activity, public policies, and leadership to build place-based communities of biotechnology innovation.

The influence of World’s Fairs on the development and dissemination of the visual culture of the United States has long been studied by historians and art historians, but the way motion pictures figured into these celebrations of nation, progress, and technology is less well understood. This article surveys cinema’s function as a conduit for visual education, a technology for immersive entertainment, an instrument of social control and a mode of advertisement in two fairs staged in 1915, the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. In its early studio-as-amusement-park and proto-museological initiatives, what I call Hollywood’s “industrial historiography” took root at those fairs in ways that would reverberate throughout the silent period and indeed continue to structure the way Hollywood thinks about itself to the present day.

This essay explores the evolving international relationship of the two national park agencies that in 1968 began to offer joint training classes for protected-area managers from around the world. Within the British settler societies that dominated nineteenth century park-making, the United States’ National Park Service (NPS) and Canada’s National Parks Branch were the most closely linked and most frequently cooperative. Contrary to campfire myths and nationalist narratives, however, the relationship was not a one-way flow of information and motivation from the US to Canada. Indeed, the latter boasted a park bureaucracy before the NPS was established. The relationship of the two nations’ park leaders in the half century leading up to 1968 demonstrates the complexity of defining the influences on park management and its diffusion from one country to another.

AbstractThe history of fungal diversity of the Northeastern United States is currently fragmentary and restricted to particular functional groups or limited geospatial scales. Here, we describe a unique by its size, lifespan and data originators dataset, to improve our understanding of species occurrence and distribution across the state and time. Between the years 2007 to 2019, over 30 parks and nature preserves were sampled during forays conducted by members of the New Jersey Mycological Association (USA), a nonprofit organization of fungi enthusiasts. The dataset contains over 400 000 occurrences of over 1400 species across the state, made up mostly of the phylum Basidiomycota (89%) and Ascomycota (11%), with most observations resolved at the species level (>99%). The database is georeferenced and openly accessible through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) repository. This dataset marks a productive endeavor to contribute to our knowledge of the biodiversity of fungi in the Northeastern United States leveraging citizen science to better resolve biodiversity of this critical and understudied kingdom.

While there has long been an archaeological interest in diverse gender identities and sexualities, queer theory was first introduced into archaeological discourse only in 2000 with the publication of ‘Queer Archaeologies’, a special edition of World Archaeology. Growing out of the exciting work being done by queer archaeologists and the increasing interest in queer theory and the archaeologies of sexuality, the National Parks Service (United States), led by Megan E. Springate, digitally published LGBTQ America: a theme study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history in 2016 as part of the LGBTQ Heritage Initiative. The goal of the LGBTQ Heritage Initiative and LGBTQ America was to explore the nuances of LGBTQ+ heritage and history in the USA. Two recently published volumes, Identities and place and Preservation and place, edited by Katherine Crawford-Lackey and Megan E. Springate, are collections of a selection of the chapters originally published as part of LGBTQ America. Identities and place and Preservation and place collectively cover many issues affecting LGBTQ+ identity, history and cultural heritage.

Campsites represent highly-sought-after recreational amenities in the national parks of the United States. Equitable allocation of scarce recreational resources has long been a key management issue in U.S. national parks, but has become increasingly difficult in an era of increasing demand. At present, a growing number of national park campsites are allocated through an online reservation system well-in-advance of a camper’s arrival at a park. Compounding the challenge of allocating these campsites is a long history of exclusivity within national park camping—institutionalized through campground design and predicated on a legacy of the leisure class’s affinity for camping in national parks. Given national park camping’s history of exclusivity, this exploratory study seeks to explore how online reservation systems may impact the demographics of national park campers. Using mobile device location data, estimated demographics were calculated for campers in five national park campgrounds in the U.S. that each contained some sites requiring reservations and some sites available on a first come, first served basis. We detail results from analyses of variance between campsites requiring reservations and those that are available on a first come, first served basis. Results suggest that for each of the five campgrounds, those campers camping in sites that require reservations came from areas with higher median household incomes, on average. In three of the five campgrounds, this difference was significant. Additionally, in an urban-proximate setting, those camping in sites requiring reservations came from areas with a higher portion of White residency than those campers in campsites not requiring reservations, on average. We conclude with discussion that includes a brief research agenda for campgrounds and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and management implications concerning the growing prominence of online reservation systems for outdoor recreation amenities. Principally, the latter group of implications includes the realization that online reservation systems present the unintended consequence of excluding low-income, and perhaps non-White, would-be campers—a conclusion drawn from the results of this exploratory study. This discussion includes an analysis of the distributive justice of online reservation systems.

Solomon Northup’s testimonial 12 Years a Slave (1853) tells the heart-wrenching story of how a free black man living in New York was captured by slave traders and forced to live as a slave on southern plantations in the 1840s under inhuman and oppressive conditions. Writing up and publishing his experiences, Northup presents a searing portrayal of the evils of slavery that influenced abolitionist arguments and movements in the pre-Civil War period as debates over slavery intensified, leading to the bloodiest war in American history. The horrors of slavery created a crisis of humanity in the United States in which a class of Americans participated in slave-holding, a practice that was seen in some parts of the country as causing a crisis of humanity in which millions were subjected to inhuman living working and living conditions. While the U.S. constitution and American revolution had produced “liberty and justice for all,” and proclaimed equal rights before the law obviously the system of slavery created a crisis for U.S. constitutional democracy that led to a Civil War that almost tore the country apart. Hollywood cinema has traditionally been reluctant to portray the horrors of slavery, providing idealizations of slavery in films like Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), and tending to ignore it during the highly charged post-World War II period that featured an intensifying powerful Civil Rights movement. Steve McQueen’s 2013 film provides a powerful cinematic rendition of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave and has been affirmed as one of the one most powerful films on slavery ever produced, a film being nominated for and winning multiple awards as I write in winter 2014. In this article, I will contrast Gordon Parks’ relatively unknown PBS “American Experience” film of 1984 Solomon Northup’s Odyssey with McQueen’s film, although I open with a look back at Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), which presents a 1839 slave revolt on a ship bound to the Americas and the subsequent trial of the rebels. The Amistad rebellion and trial, like Northup’s book, influenced the abolitionist movement and is a significant, although often forgotten moment in U.S. history. Hence, the current discussions of McQueen’s highly acclaimed film provide the opportunity for a look backwards at a painful moment in U.S. history and for discussion of different modes of cinematic representation of slavery and how a crisis of humanity in the U.S. has received different modes of cinematic representation. Accordingly, I will contrast Spielberg’s film with Parks’ and McQueen’s presentations of slavery in their versions of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave. Although Spielberg’s Amistad contains many features of dominant American ideology and an individualist Hollywood narrative which informs Spielberg’s liberal cinema, it is perhaps the most modernist and one of the most compelling of Spielberg’s films that deserves a second look and comparison with Park and McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. I will, however, first examine Amistad which provides a broader panorama of the system and complex effects of slavery in U.S. life and history than Parks’ powerful narrative of Northup’s book and McQueen’s more concentrated and intense focus on the horrors of slavery in 12 Years a Slave. I contrast Parks’ use of classical realist modes of representation with McQueen’s aestheticized and modernist version. Juxtaposing different cinematic representations of slavery and cinematic renditions of Northup’s slave testimony, I show how McQueen’s film provides a modernist version of Northup’s text that forces the audience to experience the horrors of slavery and crisis of humanity, while Parks uses a conventional realist narrative to tell Northup’s story and depict the institutions of slavery. These films, I believe, are among the best English-language cinematic efforts to engage the “peculiar” and arguably monstrous American institution of slavery that continues to shape our history today into the Obama era.Palabras clave: Esclavitud; Crisis de la humanidad; Narrativas de la crisis; Hollywood; Steven Spielberg; Steve McQueen Keywords: Slavery; Crisis of Humanity; Narratives of Crisis; Hollywood; Steven Spielberg; Steve McQueen

Abstract Protected lands like national parks are important refuges for threatened and endangered species as environmental pressures on wildlife and their habitats increase. The Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina), a species designated as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, occurs on public lands throughout the western United States including Mount Rainier National Park (MRNP), Washington. With virtually no history of timber harvest or large forest disturbance within MRNP boundaries since the park’s creation in 1899, MRNP provides an ideal place to evaluate potential impacts of climate change and invasive Barred Owls (Strix varia) on the Northern Spotted Owl. We used a multi-state, multi-season occupancy model to investigate how Northern Spotted Owl occupancy dynamics and breeding propensity are related to the presence of Barred Owls, local and regional weather, and habitat characteristics at MRNP from 1997 to 2016. Historical occupancy of Northern Spotted Owl breeding territories in MRNP has declined by 50% in the last 20 yr, and territory occupancy by breeding Northern Spotted Owls also decreased, reaching a low of 25% in 2016. Occupancy rates were higher on territories with steeper terrain and breeding rates were lower when Barred Owls were detected within historical territories. Our results also indicated that breeding propensity was higher when early nesting season temperatures during March and April were higher. In addition, the ability to detect breeding Northern Spotted Owls decreased when Barred Owls were present in the territory. Habitat variables from LiDAR were not correlated with Northern Spotted Owl occupancy dynamics, likely reflecting the dominance of old-growth forest in this protected park. This study illustrates the strong relationship between Barred Owls and Northern Spotted Owl demographics and breeding site selection in a landscape where habitat loss by timber harvest and fire has not occurred.

Image 1: A Little Free Library. Image credit: Nadine Kozak.IntroductionLittle Free Libraries give people a reason to stop and exchange things they love: books. It seemed like a really good way to build a sense of community.Dannette Lank, Little Free Library steward, Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, 2013 (Rumage)Against a backdrop of stagnant literacy rates and enduring perceptions of urban decay and the decline of communities in cities (NCES, “Average Literacy”; NCES, “Average Prose”; Putnam 25; Skogan 8), legions of Little Free Libraries (LFLs) have sprung up across the United States between 2009 and the present. LFLs are small, often homemade structures housing books and other physical media for passersby to choose a book to take or leave a book to share with others. People have installed the structures in front of homes, schools, libraries, churches, fire and police stations, community gardens, and in public parks. There are currently 50,000 LFLs around the world, most of which are in the continental United States (Aldrich, “Big”). LFLs encompass building in multiple senses of the term; LFLs are literally tiny buildings to house books and people use the structures for building neighbourhood social capital. The organisation behind the movement cites “building community” as one of its three core missions (Little Free Library). Rowan Moore, theorising humans’ reasons for building, argues desire and emotion are central (16). The LFL movement provides evidence for this claim: stewards erect LFLs based on hope for increased literacy and a desire to build community through their altruistic actions. This article investigates how LFLs build urban community and explores barriers to the endeavour, specifically municipal building and right of way ordinances used in attempts to eradicate the structures. It also examines local responses to these municipal actions and potential challenges to traditional public libraries brought about by LFLs, primarily the decrease of visits to public libraries and the use of LFLs to argue for defunding of publicly provided library services. The work argues that LFLs build community in some places but may threaten other community services. This article employs qualitative content analysis of 261 stewards’ comments about their registered LFLs on the organisation’s website drawn from the two largest cities in a Midwestern state and an interview with an LFL steward in a village in the same state to analyse how LFLs build community. The two cities, located in the state where the LFL movement began, provide a cross section of innovators, early adopters, and late adopters of the book exchanges, determined by their registered charter numbers. Press coverage and municipal documents from six cities across the US gathered through a snowball sample provide data about municipal challenges to LFLs. Blog posts penned by practising librarians furnish some opinions about the movement. This research, while not a representative sample, identifies common themes and issues around LFLs and provides a basis for future research.The act of building and curating an LFL is a representation of shared beliefs about literacy, community, and altruism. Establishing an LFL is an act of civic participation. As Nico Carpentier notes, while some civic participation is macro, carried out at the level of the nation, other participation is micro, conducted in “the spheres of school, family, workplace, church, and community” (17). Ruth H. Landman investigates voluntary activities in the city, including community gardening, and community bakeries, and argues that the people associated with these projects find themselves in a “denser web of relations” than previously (2). Gretchen M. Herrmann argues that neighbourhood garage sales, although fleeting events, build an enduring sense of community amongst participants (189). Ray Oldenburg contends that people create associational webs in what he calls “great good places”; third spaces separate from home and work (20-21). Little Free Libraries and Community BuildingEmotion plays a central role in the decision to become an LFL steward, the person who establishes and maintains the LFL. People recount their desire to build a sense of community and share their love of reading with neighbours (Charter 4684; Charter 8212; Charter 9437; Charter 9705; Charter 16561). One steward in the study reported, “I love books and I want to be able to help foster that love in our neighbourhood as well” (Charter 4369). Image 2: A Little Free Library, bench, water fountain, and dog’s water bowl for passersby to enjoy. Image credit: Nadine Kozak.Relationships and emotional ties are central to some people’s decisions to have an LFL. The LFL website catalogues many instances of memorial LFLs, tributes to librarians, teachers, and avid readers. Indeed, the first Little Free Library, built by Todd Bol in 2009, was a tribute to his late mother, a teacher who loved reading (“Our History”). In the two city study area, ten LFLs are memorials, allowing bereaved families to pass on a loved one’s penchant for sharing books and reading (Charter 1235; Charter 1309; Charter 4604; Charter 6219; Charter 6542; Charter 6954; Charter 10326; Charter 16734; Charter 24481; Charter 30369). In some cases, urban neighbours come together to build, erect, and stock LFLs. One steward wrote: “Those of us who live in this friendly neighborhood collaborated to design[,] build and paint a bungalow themed library” to match the houses in the neighbourhood (Charter 2532). Another noted: “Our neighbor across the street is a skilled woodworker, and offered to build the library for us if we would install it in our yard and maintain it. What a deal!” (Charter 18677). Community organisations also install and maintain LFLs, including 21 in the study population (e.g. Charter 31822; Charter 27155).Stewards report increased communication with neighbours due to their LFLs. A steward noted: “We celebrated the library’s launch on a Saturday morning with neighbors of all ages. We love sitting on our front porch and catching up with the people who stop to check out the books” (Charter 9673). Another exclaimed:within 24 hours, before I had time to paint it, my Little Free Library took on a life of its own. All of a sudden there were lots of books in it and people stopping by. I wondered where these books came from as I had not put any in there. Little kids in the neighborhood are all excited about it and I have met neighbors that I had never seen before. This is going to be fun! (Charter 15981)LFLs build community through social interaction and collaboration. This occurs when neighbours come together to build, install, and fill the structures. The structures also open avenues for conversation between neighbours who had no connection previously. Like Herrmann’s neighbourhood garage sales, LFLs create and maintain social ties between neighbours and link them by the books they share. Additionally, when neighbours gather and communicate at the LFL structure, they create a transitory third space for “informal public life”, where people can casually interact at a nearby location (Oldenburg 14, 288).Building Barriers, Creating CommunityThe erection of an LFL in an urban neighbourhood is not, however, always a welcome sight. The news analysis found that LFLs most often come to the attention of municipal authorities via citizen complaints, which lead to investigations and enforcement of ordinances. In Kansas, a neighbour called an LFL an “eyesore” and an “illegal detached structure” (Tapper). In Wisconsin, well-meaning future stewards contacted their village authorities to ask about rules, inadvertently setting off a six-month ban on LFLs (Stingl; Rumage). Resulting from complaints and inquiries, municipalities regulated, and in one case banned, LFLs, thus building barriers to citizens’ desires to foster community and share books with neighbours.Municipal governments use two major areas of established code to remove or prohibit LFLs: ordinances banning unapproved structures in residents’ yards and those concerned with obstructions to right of ways when stewards locate the LFLs between the public sidewalk and street.In the first instance, municipal ordinances prohibit either front yard or detached structures. Controversies over these ordinances and LFLs erupted in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, in 2012; Leawood, Kansas, in 2014; Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2015; and Dallas, Texas, in 2015. The Village of Whitefish Bay banned LFLs due to an ordinance prohibiting “front yard structures,” including mailboxes (Sanburn; Stingl). In Leawood, the city council argued that an LFL, owned by a nine-year-old boy, violated an ordinance that forbade the construction of any detached structures without city council permission. In Shreveport, the stewards of an LFL received a cease and desist letter from city council for having an “accessory structure” in the front yard (LaCasse; Burris) and Dallas officials knocked on a steward’s front door, informing her of a similar breach (Kellogg).In the second instance, some urban municipalities argued that LFLs are obstructions that block right of ways. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the public works director noted that the city “uses the area between the sidewalk and the street for snow storage in the winter, light poles, mailboxes, things like that.” The director continued: “And I imagine these little libraries are meant to congregate people like a water cooler, but we don’t want people hanging around near the road by the curb” (Heady). Both Lincoln in 2014 and Los Angeles (LA), California, in 2015, cited LFLs for obstructions. In Lincoln, the city notified the Southminster United Methodist Church that their LFL, located between the public sidewalk and street, violated a municipal ordinance (Sanburn). In LA, the Bureau of Street Services notified actor Peter Cook that his LFL, situated in the right of way, was an “obstruction” that Cook had to remove or the city would levy a fine (Moss). The city agreed at a hearing to consider a “revocable permit” for Cook’s LFL, but later denied its issuance (Condes).Stewards who found themselves in violation of municipal ordinances were able to harness emotion and build outrage over limits to individuals’ ability to erect LFLs. In Kansas, the stewards created a Facebook page, Spencer’s Little Free Library, which received over 31,000 likes and messages of support. One comment left on the page reads: “The public outcry will force those lame city officials to change their minds about it. Leave it to the stupid government to rain on everybody’s parade” (“Good”). Children’s author Daniel Handler sent a letter to the nine-year-old steward, writing as Lemony Snicket, “fighting against librarians is immoral and useless in the face of brave and noble readers such as yourself” (Spencer’s). Indeed, the young steward gave a successful speech to city hall arguing that the body should allow the structures because “‘lots of people in the neighborhood used the library and the books were always changing. I think it’s good for Leawood’” (Bauman). Other local LFL supporters also attended council and spoke in favour of the structures (Harper). In LA, Cook’s neighbours started a petition that gathered over 100 signatures, where people left comments including, “No to bullies!” (Lopez). Additionally, neighbours gathered to discuss the issue (Dana). In Shreveport, neighbours left stacks of books in their front yards, without a structure housing them due to the code banning accessory structures. One noted, “I’m basically telling the [Metropolitan Planning Commission] to go sod off” (Friedersdorf; Moss). LFL proponents reacted with frustration and anger at the perceived over-reach of the government toward harmless LFLs. In addition to the actions of neighbours and supporters, the national and local press commented on the municipal constraints. The LFL movement has benefitted from a significant amount of positive press in its formative years, a press willing to publicise and criticise municipal actions to thwart LFL development. Stewards’ struggles against municipal bureaucracies building barriers to LFLs makes prime fodder for the news media. Herbert J. Gans argues an enduring value in American news is “the preservation of the freedom of the individual against the encroachments of nation and society” (50). The juxtaposition of well-meaning LFL stewards against municipal councils and committees provided a compelling opportunity to illustrate this value.National media outlets, including Time (Sanburn), Christian Science Monitor (LaCasse), and The Atlantic, drew attention to the issue. Writing in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf critically noted:I wish I was writing this to merely extol this trend [of community building via LFLs]. Alas, a subset of Americans are determined to regulate every last aspect of community life. Due to selection bias, they are overrepresented among local politicians and bureaucrats. And so they have power, despite their small-mindedness, inflexibility, and lack of common sense so extreme that they’ve taken to cracking down on Little Free Libraries, of all things. (Friedersdorf, n.p.)Other columnists mirrored this sentiment. Writing in the LA Times, one commentator sarcastically wrote that city officials were “cracking down on one of the country’s biggest problems: small community libraries where residents share books” (Schaub). Journalists argued this was government overreach on non-issues rather than tackling larger community problems, such as income inequality, homelessness, and aging infrastructure (Solomon; Schaub). The protests and negative press coverage led to, in the case of the municipalities with front yard and detached structure ordinances, détente between stewards and councils as the latter passed amendments permitting and regulating LFLs. Whitefish Bay, Leawood, and Shreveport amended ordinances to allow for LFLs, but also to regulate them (Everson; Topil; Siegel). Ordinances about LFLs restricted their number on city blocks, placement on private property, size and height, as well as required registration with the municipality in some cases. Lincoln officials allowed the church to relocate the LFL from the right of way to church property and waived the $500 fine for the obstruction violation (Sanburn). In addition to the amendments, the protests also led to civic participation and community building including presentations to city council, a petition, and symbolic acts of defiance. Through this protest, neighbours create communities—networks of people working toward a common goal. This aspect of community building around LFLs was unintentional but it brought people together nevertheless.Building a Challenge to Traditional Libraries?LFL marketing and communication staff member Margaret Aldrich suggests in The Little Free Library Book that LFLs are successful because they are “gratifyingly doable” projects that can be accomplished by an individual (16). It is this ease of building, erecting, and maintaining LFLs that builds concern as their proliferation could challenge aspects of library service, such as public funding and patron visits. Some professional librarians are in favour of the LFLs and are stewards themselves (Charter 121; Charter 2608; Charter 9702; Charter 41074; Rumage). Others envision great opportunities for collaboration between traditional libraries and LFLs, including the library publicising LFLs and encouraging their construction as well as using LFLs to serve areas without, or far from, a public library (Svehla; Shumaker). While lauding efforts to build community, some professional librarians question the nomenclature used by the movement. They argue the phrase Little Free Libraries is inaccurate as libraries are much more than random collections of books. Instead, critics contend, the LFL structures are closer to book swaps and exchanges than actual libraries, which offer a range of services such as Internet access, digital materials, community meeting spaces, and workshops and programming on a variety of topics (American Library Association; Annoyed Librarian). One university reference and instruction librarian worries about “the general public’s perception and lumping together of little free libraries and actual ‘real’ public libraries” (Hardenbrook). By way of illustration, he imagines someone asking, “‘why do we need our tax money to go to something that can be done for FREE?’” (Hardenbrook). Librarians holding this perspective fear the movement might add to a trend of neoliberalism, limiting or ending public funding for libraries, as politicians believe that the localised, individual solutions can replace publicly funded library services. This is a trend toward what James Ferguson calls “responsibilized” citizens, those “deployed to produce governmentalized results that do not depend on direct state intervention” (172). In other countries, this shift has already begun. In the United Kingdom (UK), governments are devolving formerly public services onto community groups and volunteers. Lindsay Findlay-King, Geoff Nichols, Deborah Forbes, and Gordon Macfadyen trace the impacts of the 2012 Localism Act in the UK, which caused “sport and library asset transfers” (12) to community and volunteer groups who were then responsible for service provision and, potentially, facility maintenance as well. Rather than being in charge of a “doable” LFL, community groups and volunteers become the operators of much larger facilities. Recent efforts in the US to privatise library services as governments attempt to cut budgets and streamline services (Streitfeld) ground this fear. Image 3: “Take a Book, Share a Book,” a Little Free Library motto. Image credit: Nadine Kozak. LFLs might have real consequences for public libraries. Another potential unintended consequence of the LFLs is decreasing visits to public libraries, which could provide officials seeking to defund them with evidence that they are no longer relevant or necessary. One LFL steward and avid reader remarked that she had not used her local public library since 2014 because “I was using the Little Free Libraries” (Steward). Academics and librarians must conduct more research to determine what impact, if any, LFLs are having on visits to traditional public libraries. ConclusionLittle Free Libraries across the United States, and increasingly in other countries, have generated discussion, promoted collaboration between neighbours, and led to sharing. In other words, they have built communities. This was the intended consequence of the LFL movement. There, however, has also been unplanned community building in response to municipal threats to the structures due to right of way, safety, and planning ordinances. The more threatening concern is not the municipal ordinances used to block LFL development, but rather the trend of privatisation of publicly provided services. While people are celebrating the community built by the LFLs, caution must be exercised lest central institutions of the public and community, traditional public libraries, be lost. Academics and communities ought to consider not just impact on their local community at the street level, but also wider structural concerns so that communities can foster many “great good places”—the Little Free Libraries and traditional public libraries as well.ReferencesAldrich, Margaret. “Big Milestone for Little Free Library: 50,000 Libraries Worldwide.” Little Free Library. Little Free Library Organization. 4 Nov. 2016. 25 Feb. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/big-milestone-for-little-free-library-50000-libraries-worldwide/>.Aldrich, Margaret. The Little Free Library Book: Take a Book, Return a Book. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2015.Annoyed Librarian. “How to Protect Little Free Libraries.” Library Journal Blog 9 Jul. 2015. 26 Mar. 2017 <http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/2015/07/09/how-to-protect-little-free-libraries/>.American Library Association. “Public Library Use.” State of America’s Libraries: A Report from the American Library Association (2015). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet06>.Bauman, Caroline. “‘Little Free Libraries’ Legal in Leawood Thanks to 9-year-old Spencer Collins.” The Kansas City Star 7 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article687562.html>.Burris, Alexandria. “First Amendment Issues Surface in Little Free Library Case.” Shreveport Times 5 Feb. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/2015/02/05/expert-use-zoning-law-clashes-first-amendment/22922371/>.Carpentier, Nico. Media and Participation: A Site of Ideological-Democratic Struggle. Bristol: Intellect, 2011.Charter 121. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 1235. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 1309. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 2532. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 2608. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 4369. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 4604. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 4684. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 6219. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 6542. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 6954. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 8212. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 9437. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 9673. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 9702. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 9705. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 10326. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 15981. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 16561. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 16734. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 18677. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 24481. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 27155. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 30369. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 31822. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Charter 41074. “The World Map.” Little Free Library (2017). 26 Mar. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/>.Condes, Yvonne. “Save the Little Library!” MomsLA 10 Aug. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://momsla.com/save-the-micro-library/>.Dana. “The Tenn-Mann Library Controversy, Part 3.” Read with Dana (30 Jan. 2015). 25 Feb. 2017 <https://readwithdana.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/the-tenn-mann-library-controversy-part-three/>.Everson, Jeff. “An Ordinance to Amend and Reenact Chapter 106 of the Shreveport Code of Ordinances Relative to Outdoor Book Exchange Boxes, and Otherwise Providing with Respect Thereto.” City of Shreveport, Louisiana 9 Oct. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://ftpcontent4.worldnow.com/ksla/pdf/LFLordinance.pdf>.Ferguson, James. “The Uses of Neoliberalism.” Antipode 41.S1 (2009): 166-84.Findlay-King, Lindsay, Geoff Nichols, Deborah Forbes, and Gordon Macfadyen. “Localism and the Big Society: The Asset Transfer of Leisure Centres and Libraries—Fighting Closures or Empowering Communities.” Leisure Studies (2017): 1-13.Friedersdorf, Conor. “The Danger of Being Neighborly without a Permit.” The Atlantic 20 Feb. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/02/little-free-library-crackdown/385531/>.Gans, Herbert J. Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004.“Good Luck Spencer.” Spencer’s Little Free Library Facebook Page 25 Jun. 2014. 26 Mar. 2017 <https://www.facebook.com/Spencerslittlefreelibrary/photos/pcb.527531327376433/527531260709773/?type=3>.Hardenbrook, Joe. “A Little Rant on Little Free Libraries (AKA Probably an Unpopular Post).” Mr. Library Dude (9 Apr. 2014). 25 Feb. 2017 <https://mrlibrarydude.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/a-little-rant-on-little-free-libraries-aka-probably-an-unpopular-post/>.Harper, Deb. “Minutes.” The Leawood City Council 7 Jul. 2014. <http://www.leawood.org/pdf/cc/min/07-07-14.pdf>. Heady, Chris. “City Wants Church to Move Little Library.” Lincoln Journal Star 9 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://journalstar.com/news/local/city-wants-church-to-move-little-library/article_7753901a-42cd-5b52-9674-fc54a4d51f47.html>. Herrmann, Gretchen M. “Garage Sales Make Good Neighbors: Building Community through Neighborhood Sales.” Human Organization 62.2 (2006): 181-191.Kellogg, Carolyn. “Officials Threaten to Destroy a Little Free Library in Texas.” Los Angeles Times (1 Oct. 2015). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-little-free-library-texas-20150930-story.html>.LaCasse, Alexander. “Why Are Some Cities Cracking Down on Little Free Libraries.” Christian Science Monitor (5 Feb. 2015). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2015/0205/Why-are-some-cities-cracking-down-on-little-free-libraries>.Landman, Ruth H. Creating the Community in the City: Cooperatives and Community Gardens in Washington, DC Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993. Little Free Library. Little Free Library Organization (2017). 25 Feb. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/>.Lopez, Steve. “Actor’s Curbside Libraries Is a Smash—for Most People.” LA Times 3 Feb. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0204-lopez-library-20150204-column.html>.Moore, Rowan. Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture. New York: Harper Design, 2013.Moss, Laura. “City Zoning Laws Target Little Free Libraries.” Mother Nature Network 25 Aug. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/city-zoning-laws-target-little-free-libraries>.National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Average Literacy and Numeracy Scale Scores of 25- to 65-Year Olds, by Sex, Age Group, Highest Level of Educational Attainment, and Country of Other Education System: 2012, table 604.10. 25 Feb. 2017 <https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_604.10.asp?current=yes>.National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Average Prose, Document, and Quantitative Literacy Scores of Adults: 1992 and 2003. National Assessment of Adult Literacy. 25 Feb. 2017 <https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp>.Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999.“Our History.” Little Free Library. Little Free Library Organization (2017). 25 Feb. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourhistory/>.Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.Rumage, Jeff. “Little Free Libraries Now Allowed in Whitefish Bay.” Whitefish Bay Patch (8 May 2013). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://patch.com/wisconsin/whitefishbay/little-free-libraries-now-allowed-in-whitefish-bay>.Sanburn, Josh. “What Do Kansas and Nebraska Have against Small Libraries?” Time 10 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://time.com/2970649/tiny-libraries-violating-city-ordinances/>.Schaub, Michael. “Little Free Libraries on the Wrong Side of the Law.” LA Times 4 Feb. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-little-free-libraries-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-law-20150204-story.html>.Shumaker, David. “Public Libraries, Little Free Libraries, and Embedded Librarians.” The Embedded Librarian (28 April 2014) 26 Mar. 2017 <https://embeddedlibrarian.com/2014/04/28/public-libraries-little-free-libraries-and-embedded-librarians/>.Siegel, Julie. “An Ordinance to Amend Section 16.13 of the Municipal Code with Regard to Exempt Certain Little Free Libraries from Front Yard Setback Requirements.” Village of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin (5 Aug. 2013).Skogan, Wesley G. Police and Community in Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.Solomon, Dan. “Dallas Is Regulating ‘Little Free Libraries’ for Some Reason.” Texas Monthly (14 Sept. 2016). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/dallas-regulating-little-free-libraries-reason/>.“Spencer’s Little Free Library.” Facebook 15 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <https://www.facebook.com/Spencerslittlefreelibrary/photos/pcb.527531327376433/527531260709773/?type=3>.Steward, M. Personal Interview. 7 Feb. 2017.Stingl, Jim. “Village Slaps Endnote on Little Libraries.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 11 Nov. 2012: 1B, 7B.Streitfeld, David. “Anger as a Private Company Takes over Libraries.” The New York Times (26 Sept. 2010). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/business/27libraries.html>.Svehla, Louise. “Little Free Libraries—The Possibilities Are Endless.” Public Libraries Online (8 Mar. 2013). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2013/03/little-free-libraries-the-possibilities-are-endless/>.Tapper, Jake. “Boy Fights Council to Save His Library.” CNN 4 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2014/07/04/boy-fights-to-save-his-library/>.Topil, Greg. “Little Free Libraries in Lincoln.” City of Lincoln, Nebraska (n.d.). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://lincoln.ne.gov/City/pworks/engine/row/little-library.htm>.

On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. References ABC News. “Terrorist Videogame?” Nightline Online. 21 June 2006. 22 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2105341>. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Game Politics. “Was Congress Misled by ‘Terrorist’ Game Video? We Talk to Gamer Who Created the Footage.” 11 May 2006. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html#cutid1>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. julieb. “David Morgan Is a Horrible Writer and Should Be Fired.” Online posting. 5 May 2006. Dvorak Uncensored Cage Match Forums. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html>. Mahmood. “Terrorists Don’t Recruit with Battlefield 2.” GGL Global Gaming. 16 May 2006 http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3090>. Morgan, David. “Islamists Using U.S. Video Games in Youth Appeal.” Reuters online news service. 4 May 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=topNews &storyID=2006-05-04T215543Z_01_N04305973_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY- VIDEOGAMES.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc= NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2>. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Parker, Trey. Online posting. 7 May 2006. 9 May 2006 http://www.treyparker.com>. Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Shrader, Katherine. “Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites.” Associated Press 4 May 2006. SonicJihad. “SonicJihad: A Day in the Life of a Resistance Fighter.” Online posting. 26 Dec. 2005. Planet Battlefield Forums. 9 May 2006 http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=13670&tid=1806909&p=1>. Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.

Let me walk. Let me go at my own pace. Let me feel life as it moves through me and around me. Give me drama. Give me unexpected curvilinear corners. Give me unsettling churches and beautiful storefronts and parks I can lie down in. The city turns you on, gets you going, moving, thinking, wanting, engaging (Elkin 37, emphasis our own). Walking Is ThinkingAs feet pound the pavement, synaptic movement follows. To clear the head, one must get up and walk.In her 2016 book Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, Lauren Elkin traces the figure of the walking woman— often herself—through literary and artistic movements and the metropolis. She explores the act of flânerie, of wandering the city, as performed by George Sand, Virginia Woolf and Martha Gellhorn, amongst other peripatetic female thinkers. For Elkin, walking is at once an act of protest, of pleasure, a way to navigate personal pain, but also a way of thinking. She writes, “sometimes I walk because I have things on my mind, and walking helps me sort them out” (21).In “On the Rhythms of Walking and Seeing: Two Walks across the Page”, Evija Trofimova and Sophie Nicholls take this further, and amble towards one another thoughtfully, but from other sides of the globe. They address Elkins’s “sorting out” by coming together, not in the physical, but on the page. They address the frustration that can occur before the words appear on the page, when we as writers are “stuck”—and how moving away from the static confines of the office, away from the desk, and going for a walk, makes the work much richer when we return. Yet walking is more than that again: Trofimova and Nicholls also demonstrate how companionable the act of walking is, and how co-writing can achieve this simpatico too. Their essay is a conversation, a walk together, a work together. It is rhythmic and roaming, and like Elkin, references thinkers who have relied on the ramble to relieve the block.Walking Is WritingWhile we were editing this issue, Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust: A History of Walking appeared on the reference list of many articles we received. Wanderlust, first published in 2001, has become a contemporary classic—part of a “Walking Canon”, if you will—for its exhaustive study of walking and its artistic, philosophical, and political histories. Like Trofimova and Nicholls, Daniel Juckes also engages with Solnit’s work in his article “Walking as Practice and Prose as Path Making: How Life Writing and Journey can Intersect.” Reflecting on W. G. Sebald, Marcel Proust, and the family memoir he was writing, Juckes refers to Solnit’s discussion of the connection between place, path, and memory. He writes that “if a person is searching for some kind of possible-impossible grounding in the past, then walking pace is the pace at which to achieve that sensation (both in the world and on the page).” Like in dreams, this realm of im/possibility can occur through writing, but is also fostered through walking. As Solnit reminds us, “exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains” (13). In Juckes’s work we see how walking and memory can be intimately connected; how both, as Juckes puts it, are bound up in “the making of connections between present and past,” as we tread across old associations and they are made anew.Walking Is PrivilegeAs we discuss the pedestrian benefits of walking, it would be remiss to fail to acknowledge those with restricted mobility due to a disability or illness. Ableism permeates the world we live in. As such, an important aspect of this issue is examining how issues relating to dis/ability are a critical part of discourses around walking, and highlight inequities in access and the language we use to discuss it.We are particularly proud of Chingshun Sheu’s article, “Forced Excursion: Walking as Disability in Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed”, which engages with disability theory in its discussion of Ferris’s 2010 novel. In Ferris’s text, the protagonist’s involuntary stints of walking to exhaustion appear as disability, affecting his work, relationships and ultimately, his mortality. Sheu uses the text to explore the complexity and limitations of disability models, noting that “disability exists only at the confluence of differently abled minds and bodies and unaccommodating social and physical environs.”Walking Is PosthumanChantelle Bayes approaches these unaccommodating environs from a different angle, discussing how “marginalised groups are usually the most impacted by the strict control and ordering of contemporary urban spaces in response to utopian imaginaries of who and what belong.” Bayes’s article, “The Cyborg Flâneur: Reimagining Urban Nature through the Act of Walking”, recasts Benjamin’s flâneur as cyborg, drawing on feminist writings from Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields, and Donna Haraway—the latter of whom is particularly influential for her recent contributions to eco-feminist thought. Bayes takes us into virtual urban spaces, by examining how a revisionist concept of flânerie can be reconfigured online, allowing “for new environmental imaginaries to be created.” Bayes’s concept is at once exciting and daunting: is walking through an app what we have to look forward to in the age of the Anthropocene? Will our cities continue to be more accommodating to the lucky few? Walking as a non-corporeal action is an unsettling thought, and intriguing for this discomfort. Walking Is GentrificationLet us guide you through these city streets to our next article, as Craig Lyons, Alexandra Crosby and H. Morgan Harris take us to Sydney’s inner West, an area becoming increasingly unaccommodating for many thanks to rising living costs. Their article, “Going on a Field Trip: Critical Geographical Walking Tours and Tactical Media as Urban Praxis in Sydney, Australia”, situates us in Marrickville, which they remind us is “unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.” Already this space is contested, as all Australian urban spaces all, palimpsests of Indigeneity, colonisation, and capital. Field Trip recognises this layering, operating as “a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct,” prompting participants to take part in an act of resistance merely by walking the space.It recalls Mirror Sydney, writer Vanessa Berry’s blog (a book of the same name was published this year) that maps Sydney’s disappearing quirks. In a June entry, she notes after a walk that “in the last week new signs have gone up, signs for the impending auction of the two warehouses that make up the green building: ‘Invest, Occupy or Redevelop.’ It’s the last option that has Marrickvillians nervous” (Berry). These redevelopment nerves are confronted by Lyons, Crosby, and Harris as they examine gentrification in the area, as developers seek to exploit the area’s diverse population to attract wealth. They see their walking tour as a work of activism, a way of confronting the rapid gentrification of their city, stating that “via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities.”Walking Is PoliticalBeing able to walk is to exercise democracy. Last year in Australia, Clinton Pryor, a Wajuk, Balardung, Kija and a Yulparitja man, walked from Perth, near his home in Western Australia, to Canberra, to protest the treatment of First Nations peoples in Australia (Morelli). Indeed, one of the places where Pryor, dubbed “the Spirit Walker”, met his most rapturous welcome was in Sydney’s Redfern, not far from Marrickville. When Pryor reached Redfern, and the crowd that awaited him, he said, “I just walked in here and can’t tell you what Redfern has meant to us all over the years. Everyone knows Redfern is where we made our stand,” referring to the place’s reputation as the heartland of Australia’s Black Power movement (Murphy).Pryor’s walk demonstrates ambulatory political power—it became a march. Alina Haliliuc transports us to Bucharest, far from Australia’s dusty roads, in her article “Walking into Democratic Citizenship: Anti-Corruption Protests in Romania’s Capital”. Like Pryor, the subjects of her article “have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen.” Haliliuc draws attention to the how the Romanian public have mobilised, marching the streets and affecting real change, striving—or striding—for democracy in a region plagued by increasing political instability. Walking Is ArtFor about three years, from 1972, American artist Adrian Piper would dress up as a man she dubbed the “Mythic Being”, donning an afro wig, a moustache and sunglasses, walking the streets of New York City presenting as a man. She documented some of these public appearances in works that appeared in her 2018 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) titled “Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965-2016”. John Bowles writes that Piper, who is mixed race, uses the Mythic Being figure to “engage critically with popular representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class, challenging viewers to accept personal responsibility for xenophobia, discrimination, and the conditions that allow them to persist” (257). After being lucky enough to view the MoMA exhibition earlier this year, I was reminded of the Mythic Being when reading Derrais Carter’s article, “Black Wax(ing): On Gil Scott-Heron and the Walking Interlude”. Carter examines Scott-Heron’s walks through Washington, DC as shown in the 1982 film about the musician, Black Wax. Like much of Piper’s oeuvre, the film is a meditation on race and power in the United States, splicing footage of live performances with “walking interludes” such as Scott-Heron strolling past the White House with his toddler daughter. Carter remarks that he is “interested in the film as a wandering text, one that pushes at tensions in order to untether the viewer from a constricting narrative about who they might be”. Walking can perform this untethering, at once generating and diffusing tension about identity and space. Scott-Heron’s cinematic strolls through DC, filmed when conservative President Ronald Reagan was at the height of his power, demonstrate how walking can be a subversive, revolutionary form of artistic expression. Walking Is WayfindingIn the feature article of this special issue, “Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past”, Susan Sigre Morrison explores the complex relationship between the human and the nonhuman and centres on pilgrimage to shape this discussion. Morrison traces four pilgrimages she has taken as a young child through to her adulthood, reflecting on memory, ecocriticism, the sacred, and the Anthropocene along the way. Thickly woven, Morrison’s writing ranges between her own memories, the limestone of the Jurassic, the life of a small insect she encounters in a meal, and extracts from her mother’s diary entries telling of hikes she undertook with the child Morrison. Throughout, Morrison dwells on Donna Haraway’s concept of “making kin”, and asks, “How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece?”In thinking about walking and her body, walking and memory, walking and the nonhuman world, walking in the city and the country, Morrison lays down the suggestions of paths that many of the articles in this special issue then follow. “Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it”, Morrison writes, voicing a sentiment that, in various ways, many of the authors in this issue, and the scholars and writers they discuss, hold to be true, and fascinating, and from which so much work and thought around walking springs.Why do we walk? This is the question that we as editors kept returning to, when first we had the idea to collate a special issue on walking. While the history of walking is a well-trodden path, reaching back to the Romantics in England, the flâneurs in Paris, and the psychogeographers in cities everywhere, we resolved to look to the walkers of the contemporary world for this issue. In an age of increasingly sophisticated and prevalent technology, what is the role of the embodied act, the lived experience, of walking? With this special issue, it is our pleasure to offer a selection of work that speaks to why we walk, how we walk, and what walking means in contemporaneity. We thank the contributors, and those who expressed their interest in contributing, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers, for their work—and we hope that this issue might inspire, or prompt, or remind you, the reader, to search out your own walks.ReferencesBerry, Vanessa. “The Ming On Building”. Mirror Sydney, 15 June 2018. 4 Oct. 2018 <https://mirrorsydney.wordpress.com/2018/06/15/the-ming-on-building/>.Bowles, John Parish. Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. London: Vintage, 2016.Morelli, Laura. “Spirit Walker, Clinton Pryor Reaches Redfern on His Walk for Justice.” NITV, 11 Aug. 2017. 4 Oct. 2018 <https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2017/08/11/spirit-walker-clinton-pryor-reaches-redfern-his-walk-justice>.Murphy, Damien. “Long Walk for Justice: ‘Spiritual Walker’ Clinton Pryor Crosses the Country for His People.” Sydney Morning Herald, 10 Aug. 2017. 4 Oct. 2018 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/long-walk-for-justice-spiritual-walker-clinton-pryor-crosses-the-country-for-his-people-20170810-gxtsnt.html>.Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Granta, 2014.

…love is queered not when we discover it to be resistant to or more than its known forms, but when we see that there is no world that admits how it actually works as a principle of living. Lauren Berlant – “Love, A Queer Feeling” As the sun beats down on a very dusty Musgrave Park, the crowd is hushed in respect for the elder addressing us. It is Pride Fair Day and we are listening to the story of how this place has been a home for queer and black people throughout Brisbane’s history. Like so many others, this park has been a place of refuge in times when Boundary Streets marked the lines aboriginal people couldn’t cross to enter the genteel heart of Brisbane’s commercial district. The street names remain today, and even if movements across territory are somewhat less constrained, a manslaughter trial taking place nearby reminds us of the surveillance aboriginal people still suffer as a result of their refusal to stay off the streets and out of sight in homes they don’t have. In the past few years, Fair Day has grown in size. It now charges an entry fee to fence out unwelcome guests, so that those who normally live here have been effectively uninvited from the party. On this sunny Saturday, we sit and talk about these things, and wonder at the number of spaces still left in this city for spontaneous, non-commercial encounters and alliances. We could hardly have known that in the course of just a few weeks, the distance separating us from others would grow even further. During the course of Brisbane’s month-long Pride celebrations in 2007, two events affected the rights agendas of both queer and black Australians. First, The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report, Same Sex, Same Entitlements, was tabled in parliament. Second, the Federal government decided to declare a state of emergency in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in response to an inquiry on the state of aboriginal child abuse. (The full title of the report is “Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle”: Little Children are Sacred, and the words are from the Arrandic languages of the Central Desert Region of the Northern Territory. The report’s front cover also explains the title in relation to traditional law of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land.) While the latter issue has commanded the most media and intellectual attention, and will be discussed later in this piece, the timing of both reports provides an opportunity to consider the varying experiences of two particularly marginalised groups in contemporary Australia. In a period when the Liberal Party has succeeded in pitting minority claims against one another as various manifestations of “special interests” (Brett, Gregg) this essay suggests there is a case to be made for queer and black activists to join forces against wider tendencies that affect both communities. To do this I draw on the work of American critic, Lauren Berlant, who for many years has offered a unique take on debates about citizenship in the United States. Writing from a queer theory perspective, Berlant argues that the conservative political landscape in her country has succeeded in convincing people that “the intimacy of citizenship is something scarce and sacred, private and proper, and only for members of families” (Berlant Queen 2-3). The consequence of this shift is that politics moves from being a conversation conducted in the public sphere about social issues to instead resemble a form of adjudication on the conduct of others in the sphere of private life. In this way, Berlant indicates how heteronormative culture “uses cruel and mundane strategies both to promote change from non-normative populations and to deny them state, federal, and juridical supports because they are deemed morally incompetent to their own citizenship” (Berlant, Queen 19). In relation to the so-called state of emergency in the Northern Territory, coming so soon after attempts to encourage indigenous home-ownership in the same region, the compulsion to promote change from non-normative populations currently affects indigenous Australians in ways that resonate with Berlant’s argument. While her position reacts to an environment where the moral majority has a much firmer hold on the national political spectrum, in Australia these conservative forces have no need to be so eloquent—normativity is already embedded in a particular form of “ordinariness” that is the commonsense basis for public political debate (Allon, Brett and Moran). These issues take on further significance as home-ownership and aspirations towards it have gradually become synonymous with the demonstration of appropriate citizenship under the Coalition government: here, phrases like “an interest rate election” are assumed to encapsulate voter sentiment while “the mortgage belt” has emerged as the demographic most keenly wooed by precariously placed politicians. As Berlant argues elsewhere, the project of normalization that makes heterosexuality hegemonic also entails “material practices that, though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierarchies of property and propriety” that secure heteronormative privilege (Berlant and Warner 548). Inhabitants of remote indigenous communities in Australia are invited to desire and enact normal homes in order to be accepted and rewarded as valuable members of the nation; meanwhile gay and lesbian couples base their claims for recognition on the adequate manifestation of normal homes. In this situation black and queer activists share an interest in elaborating forms of kinship and community that resist the limited varieties of home-building currently sanctioned and celebrated by the State. As such, I will conclude this essay with a model for this alternative process of home-building in the hope of inspiring others. Home Sweet Home Ever since the declaration of terra nullius, white Australia has had a hard time recognising homes it doesn’t consider normal. To the first settlers, indigenous people’s uncultivated land lacked meaning, their seasonal itinerancy challenged established notions of property, while their communal living and wider kinship relations confused nuclear models of procreative responsibility and ancestry. From the homes white people still call “camps” many aboriginal people were moved against their will on to “missions” which even in name invoked the goal of assimilation into mainstream society. So many years later, white people continue to maintain that their version of homemaking is the most superior, the most economically effective, the most functional, with government policy and media commentators both agreeing that “the way out of indigenous disadvantage is home ownership.”(The 1 July broadcast of the esteemed political chat show Insiders provides a representative example of this consensus view among some of the country’s most respected journalists.) In the past few months, low-interest loans have been touted as the surest route out of the shared “squalor” (Weekend Australian, June 30-July1) of communal living and the right path towards economic development in remote aboriginal communities (Karvelas, “New Deal”). As these references suggest, The Australian newspaper has been at the forefront of reporting these government initiatives in a positive light: one story from late May featured a picture of Tiwi Islander Mavis Kerinaiua watering her garden with the pet dog and sporting a Tigers Aussie Rules singlet. The headline, “Home, sweet home, for Mavis” (Wilson) was a striking example of a happy and contented black woman in her own backyard, especially given how regularly mainstream national news coverage of indigenous issues follows a script of failed aboriginal communities. In stories like these, communal land ownership is painted as the cause of dysfunction, and individual homes are crucial to “changing the culture.” Never is it mentioned that communal living arrangements clearly were functional before white settlement, were an intrinsic part of “the culture”; nor is it acknowledged that the option being offered to indigenous people is land that had already been taken away from them in one way or another. That this same land can be given back only on certain conditions—including financially rewarding those who “prove they are doing well” by cultivating their garden in recognisably right ways (Karvelas, “New Deal”)— bolsters Berlant’s claim that government rhetoric succeeds by transforming wider structural questions into matters of individual responsibility. Home ownership is the stunningly selective neoliberal interpretation of “land rights”. The very notion of private property erases the social and cultural underpinnings of communal living as a viable way of life, stigmatising any alternative forms of belonging that might form the basis for another kind of home. Little Children Are Sacred The latest advance in efforts to encourage greater individual responsibility in indigenous communities highlights child abuse as the pivotal consequence of State and Local government inaction. The innocent indigenous child provides the catalyst for a myriad of competing political positions, the most vocal of which welcomes military intervention on behalf of powerless, voiceless kids trapped in horrendous scenarios (Kervalas, “Pearson’s Passion”). In these representations, the potentially abused aboriginal child takes on “supericonicity” in public debate. In her North American context, Berlant uses this concept to explain how the unborn child figures in acrimonious arguments over abortion. The foetus has become the most mobilising image in the US political scene because: it is an image of an American, perhaps the last living American, not yet bruised by history: not yet caught up in the processes of secularisation and centralisation… This national icon is too innocent of knowledge, agency, and accountability and thus has ethical claims on the adult political agents who write laws, make culture, administer resources, control things. (Berlant, Queen 6) In Australia, the indigenous child takes on supericonicity because he or she is too young to formulate a “black armband” view of history, to have a point of view on why their circumstance happens to be so objectionable, to vote out the government that wants to survey and penetrate his or her body. The child’s very lack of agency is used as justification for the military action taken by those who write laws, make the culture that will be recognized as an appropriate performance of indigeneity, administer (at the same time as they cut) essential resources; those who, for the moment, control things. However, and although a government perspective would not recognize this, in Australia the indigenous child is always already bruised by conventional history in the sense that he or she will have trouble accessing the stories of ancestors and therefore the situation that affects his or her entry into the world. Indeed, it is precisely the extent to which the government denies its institutional culpability in inflicting wounds on aboriginal people throughout history that the indigenous child’s supericonicity is now available as a political weapon. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements A situation in which the desire for home ownership is pedagogically enforced while also being economically sanctioned takes on further dimensions when considered next to the fate of other marginalised groups in society—those for whom an appeal for acceptance and equal rights pivots on the basis of successfully performing normal homes. While indigenous Australians are encouraged to aspire for home ownership as the appropriate manifestation of responsible citizenship, the HREOC report represents a group of citizens who crave recognition for already having developed this same aspiration. In the case studies selected for the Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report, discrimination against same-sex couples is identified in areas such as work and taxation, workers’ compensation, superannuation, social security, veterans’ entitlements and childrearing. It recommends changes to existing laws in these areas to match those that apply to de facto relationships. When launching the report, the commissioner argued that gay people suffer discrimination “simply because of whom they love”, and the report launch quotes a “self-described ‘average suburban family’” who insist “we don’t want special treatment …we just want equality” (HREOC). Such positioning exercises give some insight into Berlant’s statement that “love is a site that has perhaps not yet been queered enough” (Berlant, “Love” 433). A queer response to the report might highlight that by focussing on legal entitlements of the most material kind, little is done to challenge the wider situation in which one’s sexual relationship has the power to determine intimate possessions and decisions—whether this is buying a plane ticket, getting a loan, retiring in some comfort or finding a nice nursing home. An agenda calling for legislative changes to financial entitlement serves to reiterate rather than challenge the extent to which economically sanctioned subjectivities are tied to sexuality and normative models of home-building. A same-sex rights agenda promoting traditional notions of procreative familial attachment (the concerned parents of gay kids cited in the report, the emphasis on the children of gay couples) suggests that this movement for change relies on a heteronormative model—if this is understood as the manner in which the institutions of personal life remain “the privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development” (Berlant and Warner 553). What happens to those who do not seek the same procreative path? Put another way, the same-sex entitlements discourse can be seen to demand “intelligibility” within the hegemonic understanding of love, when love currently stands as the primordial signifier and ultimate suturing device for all forms of safe, reliable and useful citizenly identity (Berlant, “Love”). In its very terminology, same-sex entitlement asks to access the benefits of normativity without challenging the ideological or economic bases for its attachment to particular living arrangements and rewards. The political agenda for same-sex rights taking shape in the Federal arena appears to have chosen its objectives carefully in order to fit existing notions of proper home building and the economic incentives that come with them. While this is understandable in a conservative political environment, a wider agenda for queer activism in and outside the home would acknowledge that safety, security and belonging are universal desires that stretch beyond material acquisitions, financial concerns and procreative activity (however important these things are). It is to the possibilities this perspective might generate that I now turn. One Size Fits Most Urban space is always a host space. The right to the city extends to those who use the city. It is not limited to property owners. (Berlant and Warner, 563) The affective charge and resonance of a concept like home allows an opportunity to consider the intimacies particular to different groups in society, at the same time as it allows contemplation of the kinds of alliances increasingly required to resist neoliberalism’s impact on personal space. On one level, this might entail publicly denouncing representations of indigenous living conditions that describe them as “squalor” as some kind of hygienic short-hand that comes at the expense of advocating infrastructure suited to the very different way of living that aboriginal kinship relations typically require. Further, as alternative cultural understandings of home face ongoing pressure to fit normative ideals, a key project for contemporary queer activism is to archive, document and publicise the varied ways people choose to live at this point in history in defiance of sanctioned arrangements (eg Gorman-Murray 2007). Rights for gay and lesbian couples and parents need not be called for in the name of equality if to do so means reproducing a logic that feeds the worst stereotypes around non-procreating queers. Such a perspective fares poorly for the many literally unproductive citizens, queer and straight alike, whose treacherous refusal to breed banishes them from the respectable suburban politics to which the current government caters. Which takes me back to the park. Later that afternoon on Fair Day, we’ve been entertained by a range of performers, including the best Tina Turner impersonator I’ll ever see. But the highlight is the festival’s special guest, Vanessa Wagner who decides to end her show with a special ceremony. Taking the role of celebrant, Vanessa invites three men on to the stage who she explains are in an ongoing, committed three-way relationship. Looking a little closer, I remember meeting these blokes at a friend’s party last Christmas Eve: I was the only girl in an apartment full of gay men in the midst of some serious partying (and who could blame them, on the eve of an event that holds dubious relevance for their preferred forms of intimacy and celebration?). The wedding takes place in front of an increasingly boisterous crowd that cannot fail to appreciate the gesture as farcically mocking the sacred bastion of gay activism—same-sex marriage. But clearly, the ceremony plays a role in consecrating the obvious desire these men have for each other, in a safe space that feels something like a home. Their relationship might be a long way from many people’s definition of normal, but it clearly operates with care, love and a will for some kind of longevity. For queer subjects, faced with a history of persecution, shame and an unequal share of a pernicious illness, this most banal of possible definitions of home has been a luxury difficult to afford. Understood in this way, queer experience is hard to compare with that of indigenous people: “The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematised lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (Berlant and Warner 558). In many instances, it has “required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation” (ibid) in liminal and fleeting zones of improvisation like parties, parks and public toilets. In contrast, indigenous Australians’ distinct lines of ancestry, geography, and story continue through generations of kin in spite of the efforts of a colonising power to reproduce others in its own image. But in this sense, what queer and black Australians now share is the fight to live and love in more than one way, with more than one person: to extend relationships of care beyond the procreative imperative and to include land that is beyond the scope of one’s own backyard. Both indigenous and queer Australians stand to benefit from a shared project “to support forms of affective, erotic and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity” (Berlant and Warner 562). To build this history is to generate an archive that is “not simply a repository” but “is also a theory of cultural relevance” (Halberstam 163). A queer politics of home respects and learns from different ways of organising love, care, affinity and responsibility to a community. This essay has been an attempt to document other ways of living that take place in the pockets of one city, to show that homes often exist where others see empty space, and that love regularly survives beyond the confines of the couple. In learning from the history of oppression experienced in the immediate territories I inhabit, I also hope it captures what it means to reckon with the ongoing knowledge of being an uninvited guest in the home of another culture, one which, through shared activism, will continue to survive much longer than this, or any other archive. References Allon, Fiona. “Home as Cultural Translation: John Howard’s Earlwood.” Communal/Plural 5 (1997): 1-25. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. ———. “Love, A Queer Feeling.” Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. 432-51. ———, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 547-566. Brett, Judith. Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———, and Anthony Moran. Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians Talk About Politics, Life and the Future of Their Country. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2006. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Contesting Domestic Ideals: Queering the Australian Home.” Australian Geographer 38.2 (2007): 195-213. Gregg, Melissa. “The Importance of Being Ordinary.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10.1 (2007): 95-104. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York and London: NYU Press, 2005 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report. 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/report/index.html>. ———. Launch of Final Report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Inquiry (transcript). 2007. 5 July 2007 . Insiders. ABC TV. 1 July 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2007/s1966728.htm>. Karvelas, Patricia. “It’s New Deal or Despair: Pearson.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. ———. “How Pearson’s Passion Moved Howard to Act.” The Australian. 23 June 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21952951-5013172,00.html>. Northern Territory Government Inquiry Report into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: Little Children Are Sacred. 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.nt.gov.au/dcm/inquirysaac/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf>. Wilson, Ashleigh. “Home, Sweet Home, for Mavis.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gregg, Melissa. "Normal Homes." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>. APA Style Gregg, M. (Aug. 2007) "Normal Homes," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>.

Introduction Darkness is often characterised as something that warrants heightened caution and scrutiny – signifying increased danger and risk. Within settler-colonial settings such as Australia, cautionary and negative connotations of darkness are projected upon Black people and their bodies, forming part of continuing colonial regimes of power (Moreton-Robinson). Negative stereotypes of “dark” continues to racialise all Indigenous peoples. In Australia, Indigenous peoples are both Indigenous and Black regardless of skin colour, and this plays out in a range of ways, some of which will be highlighted within this article. This article demonstrates that for Indigenous peoples, associations of fear and danger are built into the structural mechanisms that shape and maintain colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples and their bodies. It is this embodied form of darkness, and its negative connotations, and responses that we explore further. Figure 1: Megan Cope’s ‘I’m not afraid of the Dark’ t-shirt (Fredericks and Heemsbergen 2021) Responding to the anxieties and fears of settlers that often surround Indigenous peoples, Quandamooka artist and member of the art collective ProppaNow, Megan Cope, has produced a range of t-shirts, one of which declares “I’m not afraid of the Dark” (fig. 1). The wording ‘reflects White Australia’s fear of blackness’ (Dark + Dangerous). Exploring race relations through the theme of “darkness”, we begin by discussing how negative connotations of darkness are represented through everyday lexicons and how efforts to shift prejudicial and racist language are often met with defensiveness and resistance. We then consider how fears towards the dark translate into everyday practices, reinforced by media representations. The article considers how stereotype, conjecture, and prejudice is inflicted upon Indigenous people and reflects white settler fears and anxieties, rooting colonialism in everyday language, action, and norms. The Language of Fear Indigenous people and others with dark skin tones are often presented as having a proclivity towards threatening, aggressive, deceitful, and negative behaviours. This works to inform how Indigenous peoples are “known” and responded to by hegemonic (predominantly white) populations. Negative connotations of Indigenous people are a means of reinforcing and legitimising the falsity that European knowledge systems, norms, and social structures are superior whilst denying the contextual colonial circumstances that have led to white dominance. In Australia, such denial corresponds to the refusal to engage with the unceded sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples or acknowledge Indigenous resistance. Language is integral to the ways in which dominant populations come to “know” and present the so-called “Other”. Such language is reflected in digital media, which both produce and maintain white anxieties towards race and ethnicity. When part of mainstream vernacular, racialised language – and the value judgments associated with it – often remains in what Moreton-Robinson describes as “invisible regimes of power” (75). Everyday social structures, actions, and habits of thought veil oppressive and discriminatory attitudes that exist under the guise of “normality”. Colonisation and the dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing, being, and doing has fixated itself on creating a normality that associates Indigeneity and darkness with negative and threatening connotations. In doing so, it reinforces power balances that presents an image of white superiority built on the invalidation of Indigeneity and Blackness. White fears and anxieties towards race made explicit through social and digital media are also manifest via subtle but equally pervasive everyday action (Carlson and Frazer; Matamoros-Fernández). Confronting and negotiating such fears becomes a daily reality for many Indigenous people. During the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, which extended to Australia and were linked to deaths in custody and police violence, African American poet Saul Williams reminded his followers of the power of language in constructing racialised fears (saulwilliams). In an Instagram post, Williams draws back the veil of an uncontested normality to ask that we take personal responsibility over the words we use. He writes: here’s a tip: Take the words DARK or BLACK in connection to bad, evil, ominous or scary events out of your vocabulary. We learn the stock market crashed on Black Monday, we read headlines that purport “Dark Days Ahead”. There’s “dark” or “black” humour which implies an undertone of evil, and then there are people like me who grow up with dark skin having to make sense of the English/American lexicon and its history of “fair complexions” – where “fair” can mean “light; blond.” OR “in accordance with rules or standards; legitimate.” We may not be fully responsible for the duplicitous evolution of language and subtle morphing of inherited beliefs into description yet we are in full command of the words we choose even as they reveal the questions we’ve left unasked. Like the work of Moreton-Robinson and other scholars, Williams implores his followers to take a reflexive position to consider the questions often left unasked. In doing so, he calls for the transcendence of anonymity and engagement with the realities of colonisation – no matter how ugly, confronting, and complicit one may be in its continuation. In the Australian context this means confronting how terms such as “dark”, “darkie”, or “darky” were historically used as derogatory and offensive slurs for Aboriginal peoples. Such language continues to be used today and can be found in the comment sections of social media, online news platforms, and other online forums (Carlson “Love and Hate”). Taking the move to execute personal accountability can be difficult. It can destabilise and reframe the ways in which we understand and interact with the world (Rose 22). For some, however, exposing racism and seemingly mundane aspects of society is taken as a personal attack which is often met with reactionary responses where one remains closed to new insights (Whittaker). This feeds into fears and anxieties pertaining to the perceived loss of power. These fears and anxieties continue to surface through conversations and calls for action on issues such as changing the date of Australia Day, the racialised reporting of news (McQuire), removing of plaques and statues known to be racist, and requests to change placenames and the names of products. For example, in 2020, Australian cheese producer Saputo Dairy Australia changed the name of it is popular brand “Coon” to “Cheer Tasty”. The decision followed a lengthy campaign led by Dr Stephen Hagan who called for the rebranding based on the Coon brand having racist connotations (ABC). The term has its racist origins in the United States and has long been used as a slur against people with dark skin, liking them to racoons and their tendency to steal and deceive. The term “Coon” is used in Australia by settlers as a racist term for referring to Aboriginal peoples. Claims that the name change is example of political correctness gone astray fail to acknowledge and empathise with the lived experience of being treated as if one is dirty, lazy, deceitful, or untrustworthy. Other brand names have also historically utilised racist wording along with imagery in their advertising (Conor). Pear’s soap for example is well-known for its historical use of racist words and imagery to legitimise white rule over Indigenous colonies, including in Australia (Jackson). Like most racial epithets, the power of language lies in how the words reflect and translate into actions that dehumanise others. The words we use matter. The everyday “ordinary” world, including online, is deeply politicised (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”) and comes to reflect attitudes and power imbalances that encourage white people to internalise the falsity that they are superior and should have control over Black people (Conor). Decisions to make social change, such as that made by Saputo Dairy Australia, can manifest into further white anxieties via their ability to force the confrontation of the circumstances that continue to contribute to one’s own prosperity. In other words, to unveil the realities of colonialism and ask the questions that are too often left in the dark. Lived Experiences of Darkness Colonial anxieties and fears are driven by the fact that Black populations in many areas of the world are often characterised as criminals, perpetrators, threats, or nuisances, but are rarely seen as victims. In Australia, the repeated lack of police response and receptivity to concerns of Indigenous peoples expressed during the Black Lives Matter campaign saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets to protest. Protestors at the same time called for the end of police brutality towards Indigenous peoples and for an end to Indigenous deaths in custody. The protests were backed by a heavy online presence that sought to mobilise people in hope of lifting the veil that shrouds issues relating to systemic racism. There have been over 450 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to die in custody since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 (The Guardian). The tragedy of the Indigenous experience gains little attention internationally. The negative implications of being the object of white fear and anxiety are felt by Indigenous and other Black communities daily. The “safety signals” (Daniella Emanuel) adopted by white peoples in response to often irrational perceptions of threat signify how Indigenous and other Black peoples and communities are seen and valued by the hegemony. Memes played out in social media depicting “Karens” – a term that corresponds to caricaturised white women (but equally applicable to men) who exhibit behaviours of entitlement – have increasing been used in media to expose the prevalence of irrational racial fears (also see Wong). Police are commonly called on Indigenous people and other Black people for simply being within spaces such as shopping malls, street corners, parks, or other spaces in which they are considered not to belong (Mohdin). Digital media are also commonly envisioned as a space that is not natural or normal for Indigenous peoples, a notion that maintains narratives of so-called Indigenous primitivity (Carlson and Frazer). Media connotations of darkness as threatening are associated with, and strategically manipulated by, the images that accompany stories about Indigenous peoples and other Black peoples. Digital technologies play significant roles in producing and disseminating the images shown in the media. Moreover, they have a “role in mediating and amplifying old and new forms of abuse, hate, and discrimination” (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas). Daniels demonstrates how social media sites can be spaces “where race and racism play out in interesting, sometimes disturbing, ways” (702), shaping ongoing colonial fears and anxieties over Black peoples. Prominent footballer Adam Goodes, for example, faced a string of attacks after he publicly condemned racism when he was called an “Ape” by a spectator during a game celebrating Indigenous contributions to the sport (Coram and Hallinan). This was followed by a barrage of personal attacks, criticisms, and booing that spread over the remaining years of his football career. When Goodes performed a traditional war dance as a form of celebration during a game in 2015, many turned to social media to express their outrage over his “confrontational” and “aggressive” behaviour (Robinson). Goodes’s affirmation of his Indigeneity was seen by many as a threat to their own positionality and white sensibility. Social media were therefore used as a mechanism to control settler narratives and maintain colonial power structures by framing the conversation through a white lens (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”). Indigenous peoples in other highly visible fields have faced similar backlash. In 1993, Elaine George was the first Aboriginal person to feature on the cover of Vogue magazine, a decision considered “risky” at the time (Singer). The editor of Vogue later revealed that the cover was criticised by some who believed George’s skin tone was made to appear lighter than it actually was and that it had been digitally altered. The failure to accept a lighter skin colour as “Aboriginal” exposes a neglect to accept ethnicity and Blackness in all its diversity (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”; Carlson “Love and Hate”). Where Adam Goodes was criticised for his overt expression of Blackness, George was critisised for not being “black enough”. It was not until seventeen years later that another Aboriginal model, Samantha Harris, was featured on the cover of Vogue (Marks). While George inspired and pathed the way for those to come, Harris experienced similar discrimination within the industry and amongst the public (Carson and Ky). Singer Jessica Mauboy (in Hornery) also explains how her identity was managed by others. She recalls, I was pretty young when I first received recognition, and for years I felt as though I couldn't show my true identity. What I was saying in public was very dictated by other people who could not handle my sense of culture and identity. They felt they had to take it off my hands. Mauboy’s experience not only demonstrates how Blackness continues to be seen as something to “handle”, but also how power imbalances play out. Scholar Chelsea Watego offers numerous examples of how this occurs in different ways and arenas, for example through relationships between people and within workplaces. Bargallie’s scholarly work also provides an understanding of how Indigenous people experience racism within the Australian public service, and how it is maintained through the structures and systems of power. The media often represents communities with large Indigenous populations as being separatist and not contributing to wider society and problematic (McQuire). Violence, and the threat of violence, is often presented in media as being normalised. Recently there have been calls for an increased police presence in Alice Springs, NT, and other remotes communities due to ongoing threats of “tribal payback” and acts of “lawlessness” (Sky News Australia; Hildebrand). Goldberg uses the phrase “Super/Vision” to describe the ways that Black men and women in Black neighbourhoods are continuously and erroneously supervised and surveilled by police using apparatus such as helicopters and floodlights. Simone Browne demonstrates how contemporary surveillance practices are rooted in anti-black domination and are operationalised through a white gaze. Browne uses the term “racializing surveillance” to describe a ”technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’” (16). The outcome is often discriminatory treatment to those negatively racialised by such surveillance. Narratives that associate Indigenous peoples with darkness and danger fuel colonial fears and uphold the invisible regimes of power by instilling the perception that acts of surveillance and the restrictions imposed on Indigenous peoples’ autonomy are not only necessary but justified. Such myths fail to contextualise the historic colonial factors that drive segregation and enable a forgetting that negates personal accountability and complicity in maintaining colonial power imbalances (Riggs and Augoustinos). Inayatullah and Blaney (165) write that the “myth we construct calls attention to a darker, tragic side of our ethical engagement: the role of colonialism in constituting us as modern actors.” They call for personal accountability whereby one confronts the notion that we are both products and producers of a modernity rooted in a colonialism that maintains the misguided notion of white supremacy (Wolfe; Mignolo; Moreton-Robinson). When Indigenous and other Black peoples enter spaces that white populations don’t traditionally associate as being “natural” or “fitting” for them (whether residential, social, educational, a workplace, online, or otherwise), alienation, discrimination, and criminalisation often occurs (Bargallie; Mohdin; Linhares). Structural barriers are erected, prohibiting career or social advancement while making the space feel unwelcoming (Fredericks; Bargallie). In workplaces, Indigenous employees become the subject of hyper-surveillance through the supervision process (Bargallie), continuing to make them difficult work environments. This is despite businesses and organisations seeking to increase their Indigenous staff numbers, expressing their need to change, and implementing cultural competency training (Fredericks and Bargallie). As Barnwell correctly highlights, confronting white fears and anxieties must be the responsibility of white peoples. When feelings of shock or discomfort arise when in the company of Indigenous peoples, one must reflexively engage with the reasons behind this “fear of the dark” and consider that perhaps it is they who are self-segregating. Mohdin suggests that spaces highly populated by Black peoples are best thought of not as “black spaces” or “black communities”, but rather spaces where white peoples do not want to be. They stand as reminders of a failed colonial regime that sought to deny and dehumanise Indigenous peoples and cultures, as well as the continuation of Black resistance and sovereignty. Conclusion In working towards improving relationships between Black and white populations, the truths of colonisation, and its continuing pervasiveness in local and global settings must first be confronted. In this article we have discussed the association of darkness with instinctual fears and negative responses to the unknown. White populations need to reflexively engage and critique how they think, act, present, address racism, and respond to Indigenous peoples (Bargallie; Moreton-Robinson; Whittaker), cultivating a “decolonising consciousness” (Bradfield) to develop new habits of thinking and relating. To overcome fears of the dark, we must confront that which remains unknown, and the questions left unasked. This means exposing racism and power imbalances, developing meaningful relationships with Indigenous peoples, addressing structural change, and implementing alternative ways of knowing and doing. Only then may we begin to embody Megan Cope’s message, “I’m not afraid of the Dark”. Acknowledgements We thank Dr Debbie Bargallie for her feedback on our article, which strengthened the work. References ABC News. "Coon Cheese Changes Name to Cheer Cheese, Pledging to 'Build a Culture of Acceptance'." 13 Jan. 2021. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-13/coon-cheese-changes-name-cheer-racist-slur-stephen-hagan/13053524>. Alter, Adam L., et al. "The “Bad Is Black” Effect: Why People Believe Evildoers Have Darker Skin than Do-Gooders." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 42.12 (2016): 1653-1665. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167216669123>. Assari, Shervin, and Cleopatra Howard Caldwell. "Darker Skin Tone Increases Perceived Discrimination among Male but Not Female Caribbean Black Youth." Children 4.12 (2017): 107. <https://doi.org/10.3390/children4120107>. Attwood, Brian. The Making of the Aborigines. Routledge, 2020. Bargallie, Debbie. Unmasking the Racial Contract: Indigenous Voices on Racism in the Australian Public Service. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2020. Barnwell, William. "White Fears, Black People: Voluntary Segregation and How to Stop It." The Lens, 28 Jan 2020. 4 Aug. 2020 <https://thelensnola.org/2020/01/28/voluntary-segregation-and-how-to-stop-it/>. Bradfield, Abraham. "Decolonizing the Intercultural: A Call for Decolonizing Consciousness in Settler-Colonial Australia." Religions 10.8 (2019): 469. <https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/8/469>. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015. Carlson, Bronwyn. "Love and Hate at the Cultural Interface: Indigenous Australians and Dating Apps." Journal of Sociology 56.2 (2020): 133-50. <https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1440783319833181>. ———. The Politics of Identity: Who Counts as Aboriginal Today? Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016. Carlson, Bronwyn, and Ryan Frazer. Social Media Mob: Being Indigenous Online. Macquarie University, 2018. ———. "’They Got Filters’: Indigenous Social Media, the Settler Gaze, and a Politics of Hope." Social Media+ Society 6.2 (2017): 107. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120925261>. Carson, Sarah, and Jenny Ky. "Samantha Harris Speaks Out on Racism in the Modelling Industry." 7 News, 2020. 29 Jan. 2021 <https://7news.com.au/the-morning-show/samantha-harris-speaks-out-on-racism-in-the-modelling-industry-c-1111266>. Conor, Liz. "Dove, Real Beauty and the Racist History of Skin Whitening." Mumbrella, 10 Oct. 2017. 15 Mar. 2021 <https://mumbrella.com.au/dove-real-beauty-racist-history-skin-whitening-476801>. Coram, Stella, and Chris Hallinan. "Critical Race Theory and the Orthodoxy of Race Neutrality: Examining the Denigration of Adam Goodes." Australian Aboriginal Studies 1 (2017): 99-111. <https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=907032851637853;res=IELAPA>. Daniels, Jessie. “Race and Racism in Internet Studies: A Review and Critique.” New Media & Society 15.5 (2013): 695-719. Dark + Disturbing. "I’m Not Afraid of the Dark." 10 Dec. 2020 <https://www.darkanddisturbing.com.au/shop/im-not-afraid-of-the-dark/>. Doyle, Michael. “The Drum.” ABC TV, 15 Apr. 2021. <https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2107H054S00>. Emanuel, Daniella. "The Psychology of Black and Why We’re Scared of the Dark." CNN Health, 1 Sep . 2017. 5 Aug. 2020 <https://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/01/health/colorscope-black-fear-of-darkness/index.html>. Fredericks, Bronwyn. "Collaborative Creative Processes That Challenge Us as "Anomaly", and Affirm Our Indigeneity and Enact Our Sovereignty." M/C Journal 23.5 (2020). <https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1674>. ———. "'We Don't Leave Our Identities at the City Limits': Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People Living in Urban Localities." Australian Aboriginal Studies 1 (2013): 4-16. <https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/informit.422915104662241>. Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Debbie Bargallie. “Situating Race in Cultural Competency Training: A Site of Self-Revelation.” M/C Journal 23.4 (2020). <https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1660>. Goldberg, David Theo. Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America. Psychology Press, 1997. Grewal, Daisy "The "Bad Is Black" Effect." Scientific American 17 Jan. 2017. 5 Dec. 2020 <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-bad-is-black-effect/>. Hebl, Michelle R., et al. "Selectively Friending: Racial Stereotypicality and Social Rejection." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48.6 (2012): 1329-1335. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.05.019>. Hildebrand, Joe. "Jacinta Price Exposes Hypocrisy of ‘So-Called Progressives’ on Indigenous Violence ‘Epidemic’." Sky News Australia, 2021. 19 Apr. 2021 <https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6249296751001>. Hornery, Andrew. "Jessica Mauboy Is Discovering Her Much-Loved Voice Can Do More than Just Sing." The Age, 17 Dec. 2019. 28 Jan. 2021 <https://www.theage.com.au/culture/celebrity/jessica-mauboy-is-discovering-her-much-loved-voice-can-do-more-than-just-sing-20191217-p53kpz.html>. Inayatullah, Naeem, and David L. Blaney. "The Dark Heart of Kindness: The Social Construction of Deflection." International Studies Perspectives 13.2 (2012): 164-175. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/44218688>. Jackson, Lauren Michele. “We Need to Talk about Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs.” Teen Vogue, 2 Aug. 2017. <https://www.teenvogue.com/story/digital-blackface-reaction-gifs>. Jackson, Kathleen. "'Nulla-Nulla: Australia’s White Hope, the Best Household Soap' 1920s." 18 1 (2015): 70-74. <https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jillian_Barnes/publication/306379190_Representation_and_Power_A_Picture_is_Worth_a_Thousand_Words_-_'Nulla-Nulla_Australia's_White_Hope_The_Best_Household_Soap'_1920s/links/57bbf86e08ae9fdf82ef41d6/Representation-and-Power-A-Picture-is-Worth-a-Thousand-Words-Nulla-Nulla-Australias-White-Hope-The-Best-Household-Soap-1920s.pdf>. Jackson, Reggie. "Scared while White: Hysteria about Peple of Color due to Paranoid Fear of Retribution." Milwaukee Independent, 14 May 2018. 4 Aug. 2020 <http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/featured/scared-white-hysteria-people-color-due-paranoid-fear-retribution/>. Kahn, Kimberly Barsamian, and Paul G. Davies. "Differentially Dangerous? Phenotypic Racial Stereotypicality Increases Implicit Bias among Ingroup and Outgroup Members." Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 14.4 (2011): 569-580. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430210374609>. Kahn, Kimberly Barsamian, et al. "Protecting Whiteness: White Phenotypic Racial Stereotypicality Reduces Police Use of Force." Social Psychological and Personality Science 7.5 (2016): 403-411. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616633505>. Kibria, Nazli, et al. "Imagining the Radicalized Muslim: Race, Anti-Muslim Discourse, and Media Narratives of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombers." Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4.2 (2018): 192-205. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649217731113>. Lawrence, John. "Indigenous Lives Matter." Arena Magazine 163 (Dec. 2019): 22-24. <https://search-informit-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/doi/10.3316/informit.920791245017394>. Linhares, Zachary. "Overcoming Our Fear of Black Skin." UMKC: University News, 19 Oct. 2016. 5 Aug. 2020 <https://info.umkc.edu/unews/overcoming-our-fear-of-black-skin/>. Loury, Glenn C. "When Black Lives Matter: Thoughts on the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America." Horizons: Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development 17 (2020): 190-207. DOI:10.2307/48590573. Marks, Kathy. "Australian Fashionistas Embrace the New Aboriginal Face of ‘Vogue’." Independent, 2011. 29 Jan. 2021 <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/australian-fashionistas-embrace-new-aboriginal-face-vogue-1970013.html>. Matamoros-Fernández, Ariadna. “Platformed Racism: The Mediation and Circulation of an Australian Race-Based Controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.” Information, Communication & Society 20.6 (2017): 930–46. Matamoros- Fernández, Ariadna, and Johan Farkas. “Racism, Hate Speech, and Social Media: A Systemic Review and Critique.” Television & New Media 22.2 (2021): 205-224. McQuire, Amy. “Black and White Witness.” Meanjin Quarterly, 2019. <https://meanjin.com.au/essays/black-and-white-witness/>. Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton University Press, 2012. Mohdin, Aamna. "Us History Explains That White Fear Is Just Another Way to Enforce Racial Segregation." Quartz, 25 May 2018. 4 Aug. 2020 <https://qz.com/1288067/us-history-explains-that-white-fear-of-black-people-is-just-another-tool-to-enforce-racial-segregation/>. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. "Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation." Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004. 75-88. Quadrant. "Stan Grant Given a Good Tanning." Quadrant, 29 Aug. 2017. 25 Feb. 2021 <https://quadrant.org.au/stan-grant-given-good-tanning/>. Riggs, Damien W., and Martha Augoustinos. "The Psychic Life of Colonial Power: Racialised Subjectivities, Bodies and Methods." Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 15.6 (2005): 461-477. <https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.838>. Riggs, Damien Wayne. "Benevolence and the Management of Stake: On Being 'Good White People'." Philament 4 (Aug. 2004). <http://hdl.handle.net/2328/14258>. Robinson, Mark. "Adam Goodes’ War Cry Social Media Reaction Shows We’re at War with Ourselves, Says Mark Robinson." Herald Sun, 2015. 13 Jan. 2021 <https://www.news.com.au/adam-goodes-war-cry-social-media-reaction-shows-were-at-war-with-ourselves-says-mark-robinson/news-story/b553ef775ceb9611132a0502456eff35>. Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004. saulwilliams. "Here’s a Tip." Instagram, 3 June 2020. <https://www.instagram.com/p/CA8Na0LheY3/?igshid=1vxmglle09nl2>. Schaller, M., et al. "Fear of the Dark: Interactive Effects of Beliefs about Danger and Ambient Darkness on Ethnic Stereotypes." Pers Soc Psychol Bull 29.5 (2003): 637-649. DOI:10.1177/0146167203029005008. Singer, Melissa. "The ‘Risky’ Vogue Cover That Made History but Almost Never Happened." Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Sep. 2020. 18 Jan. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/the-risky-vogue-cover-that-made-history-but-almost-never-happened-20200918-p55wxo.html>. Sky News Australia. "Police Presence Needed to Counter Indigenous ‘Tribal Oayback’ Traditions: Price." 2021. 19 Apr. 2021 <https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6249296751001>. The Guardian. "Deaths Inside: Every Indigenous Death in Custody since 2008." 10 Dec. 2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2018/aug/28/deaths-inside-indigenous-australian-deaths-in-custody>. Watego, Chelsea. “Because She Is Black.” IndigenousX, 28 May 2018. <https://indigenousx.com.au/chelsea-bond-because-she-is-black/>. ———. “The Irony of the Aboriginal academic.” IndigenousX, 20 May 2018. <https://indigenousx.com.au/chelsea-bond-the-irony-of-the-aboriginal-academic/>. Westbrook, Dmitri C. "Opinion Editorial: Why Is It That So Many White People Fear Black Men?" College Student Affairs Leadership 1.2 (2014). <http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/csal/vol1/iss2/4>. Whittaker, Alison. “So White. So What.” Meanjin Quarterly (Autumn 2020). <https://meanjin.com.au/essays/so-white-so-what/>. Wolfe, Patrick. "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native." Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 387-409. DOI:10.1080/14623520601056240. Wong, Julia "The Year of Karen: How a Meme Changed the Way Americans Talked about Racism." The Guardian, 27 Dec. 2020. 15 Jan. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/27/karen-race-white-women-black-americans-racism>.

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

Introduction In December 2010, Nespresso, the world’s leading brand of premium-portioned coffee, opened a flagship “boutique” in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall. This was Nespresso’s fifth boutique opening of 2010, after Brussels, Miami, Soho, and Munich. The Sydney debut coincided with the mall’s upmarket redevelopment, which explains Nespresso’s arrival in the city: strategic geographic expansion is key to the brand’s growth. Rather than panoramic ubiquity, a retail option favoured by brands like McDonalds, KFC and Starbucks, Nespresso opts for iconic, prestigious locations. This strategy has been highly successful: since 2000 Nespresso has recorded year-on-year per annum growth of 30 per cent. This has been achieved, moreover, despite a global financial downturn and an international coffee market replete with brand variety. In turn, Nespresso marks an evolution in the coffee market over the last decade. The Nespresso Story Founded in 1986, Nespresso is the fasting growing brand in the Nestlé Group. Its headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland, with over 7,000 employees worldwide. In 2012, Nespresso had 270 boutiques in 50 countries. The brand’s growth strategy involves three main components: premium coffee capsules, “mated” with specially designed machines, and accompanied by exceptional customer service through the Nespresso Club. Each component requires some explanation. Nespresso offers 16 varieties of Grand Crus coffee: 7 espresso blends, 3 pure origin espressos, 3 lungos (for larger cups), and 3 decaffeinated coffees. Each 5.5 grams of portioned coffee is cased in a hermetically sealed aluminium capsule, or pod, designed to preserve the complex, volatile aromas (between 800 and 900 per pod), and prevent oxidation. These capsules are designed to be used exclusively with Nespresso-branded machines, which are equipped with a patented high-pressure extraction system designed for optimum release of the coffee. These machines, of which there are 28 models, are developed with 6 machine partners, and Antoine Cahen, from Ateliers du Nord in Lausanne, designs most of them. For its consumers, members of the Nespresso Club, the capsules and machines guarantee perfect espresso coffee every time, within seconds and with minimum effort—what Nespresso calls the “ultimate coffee experience.” The Nespresso Club promotes this experience as an everyday luxury, whereby café-quality coffee can be enjoyed in the privacy and comfort of Club members’ homes. This domestic focus is a relatively recent turn in its history. Nestlé patented some of its pod technology in 1976; the compatible machines, initially made in Switzerland by Turmix, were developed a decade later. Nespresso S. A. was set up as a subsidiary unit within the Nestlé Group with a view to target the office and fine restaurant sector. It was first test-marketed in Japan in 1986, and rolled out the same year in Switzerland, France and Italy. However, by 1988, low sales prompted Nespresso’s newly appointed CEO, Jean-Paul Gillard, to rethink the brand’s focus. Gillard subsequently repositioned Nespresso’s target market away from the commercial sector towards high-income households and individuals, and introduced a mail-order distribution system; these elements became the hallmarks of the Nespresso Club (Markides 55). The Nespresso Club was designed to give members who had purchased Nespresso machines 24-hour customer service, by mail, phone, fax, and email. By the end of 1997 there were some 250,000 Club members worldwide. The boom in domestic, user-friendly espresso machines from the early 1990s helped Nespresso’s growth in this period. The cumulative efforts by the main manufacturers—Krups, Bosch, Braun, Saeco and DeLonghi—lowered the machines’ average price to around US $100 (Purpura, “Espresso” 88; Purpura, “New” 116). This paralleled consumers’ growing sophistication, as they became increasingly familiar with café-quality espresso, cappuccino and latté—for reasons to be detailed below. Nespresso was primed to exploit this cultural shift in the market and forge a charismatic point of difference: an aspirational, luxury option within an increasingly accessible and familiar field. Between 2006 and 2008, Nespresso sales more than doubled, prompting a second production factory to supplement the original plant in Avenches (Simonian). In 2008, Nespresso grew 20 times faster than the global coffee market (Reguly B1). As Nespresso sales exceeded $1.3 billion AU in 2009, with 4.8 billion capsules shipped out annually and 5 million Club members worldwide, it became Nestlé’s fastest growing division (Canning 28). According to Nespresso’s Oceania market director, Renaud Tinel, the brand now represents 8 per cent of the total coffee market; of Nespresso specifically, he reports that 10,000 cups (using one capsule per cup) were consumed worldwide each minute in 2009, and that increased to 12,300 cups per minute in 2010 (O’Brien 16). Given such growth in such a brief period, the atypical dynamic between the boutique, the Club and the Nespresso brand warrants closer consideration. Nespresso opened its first boutique in Paris in 2000, on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was a symbolic choice and signalled the brand’s preference for glamorous precincts in cosmopolitan cities. This has become the design template for all Nespresso boutiques, what the company calls “brand embassies” in its press releases. More like art gallery-style emporiums than retail spaces, these boutiques perform three main functions: they showcase Nespresso coffees, machines and accessories (all elegantly displayed); they enable Club members to stock up on capsules; and they offer excellent customer service, which invariably equates to detailed production information. The brand’s revenue model reflects the boutique’s role in the broader business strategy: 50 per cent of Nespresso’s business is generated online, 30 per cent through the boutiques, and 20 per cent through call centres. Whatever floor space these boutiques dedicate to coffee consumption is—compared to the emphasis on exhibition and ambience—minimal and marginal. In turn, this tightly monitored, self-focused model inverts the conventional function of most commercial coffee sites. For several hundred years, the café has fostered a convivial atmosphere, served consumers’ social inclinations, and overwhelmingly encouraged diverse, eclectic clientele. The Nespresso boutique is the antithesis to this, and instead actively limits interaction: the Club “community” does not meet as a community, and is united only in atomised allegiance to the Nespresso brand. In this regard, Nespresso stands in stark contrast to another coffee brand that has been highly successful in recent years—Starbucks. Starbucks famously recreates the aesthetics, rhetoric and atmosphere of the café as a “third place”—a term popularised by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe non-work, non-domestic spaces where patrons converge for respite or recreation. These liminal spaces (cafés, parks, hair salons, book stores and such locations) might be private, commercial sites, yet they provide opportunities for chance encounters, even therapeutic interactions. In this way, they aid sociability and civic life (Kleinman 193). Long before the term “third place” was coined, coffee houses were deemed exemplars of egalitarian social space. As Rudolf P. Gaudio notes, the early coffee houses of Western Europe, in Oxford and London in the mid-1600s, “were characterized as places where commoners and aristocrats could meet and socialize without regard to rank” (670). From this sanguine perspective, they both informed and animated the modern public sphere. That is, and following Habermas, as a place where a mixed cohort of individuals could meet and discuss matters of public importance, and where politics intersected society, the eighteenth-century British coffee house both typified and strengthened the public sphere (Karababa and Ger 746). Moreover, and even from their early Ottoman origins (Karababa and Ger), there has been an historical correlation between the coffee house and the cosmopolitan, with the latter at least partly defined in terms of demographic breadth (Luckins). Ironically, and insofar as Nespresso appeals to coffee-literate consumers, the brand owes much to Starbucks. In the two decades preceding Nespresso’s arrival, Starbucks played a significant role in refining coffee literacy around the world, gauging mass-market trends, and stirring consumer consciousness. For Nespresso, this constituted major preparatory phenomena, as its strategy (and success) since the early 2000s presupposed the coffee market that Starbucks had helped to create. According to Nespresso’s chief executive Richard Giradot, central to Nespresso’s expansion is a focus on particular cities and their coffee culture (Canning 28). In turn, it pays to take stock of how such cities developed a coffee culture amenable to Nespresso—and therein lays the brand’s debt to Starbucks. Until the last few years, and before celebrity ambassador George Clooney was enlisted in 2005, Nespresso’s marketing was driven primarily by Club members’ recommendations. At the same time, though, Nespresso insisted that Club members were coffee connoisseurs, whose knowledge and enjoyment of coffee exceeded conventional coffee offerings. In 2000, Henk Kwakman, one of Nestlé’s Coffee Specialists, explained the need for portioned coffee in terms of guaranteed perfection, one that demanding consumers would expect. “In general”, he reasoned, “people who really like espresso coffee are very much more quality driven. When you consider such an intense taste experience, the quality is very important. If the espresso is slightly off quality, the connoisseur notices this immediately” (quoted in Butler 50). What matters here is how this corps of connoisseurs grew to a scale big enough to sustain and strengthen the Nespresso system, in the absence of a robust marketing or educative drive by Nespresso (until very recently). Put simply, the brand’s ascent was aided by Starbucks, specifically by the latter’s success in changing the mainstream coffee market during the 1990s. In establishing such a strong transnational presence, Starbucks challenged smaller, competing brands to define themselves with more clarity and conviction. Indeed, working with data that identified just 200 freestanding coffee houses in the US prior to 1990 compared to 14,000 in 2003, Kjeldgaard and Ostberg go so far as to state that: “Put bluntly, in the US there was no local coffee consumptionscape prior to Starbucks” (Kjeldgaard and Ostberg 176). Starbucks effectively redefined the coffee world for mainstream consumers in ways that were directly beneficial for Nespresso. Starbucks: Coffee as Ambience, Experience, and Cultural Capital While visitors to Nespresso boutiques can sample the coffee, with highly trained baristas and staff on site to explain the Nespresso system, in the main there are few concessions to the conventional café experience. Primarily, these boutiques function as material spaces for existing Club members to stock up on capsules, and therefore they complement the Nespresso system with a suitably streamlined space: efficient, stylish and conspicuously upmarket. Outside at least one Sydney boutique for instance (Bondi Junction, in the fashionable eastern suburbs), visitors enter through a club-style cordon, something usually associated with exclusive bars or hotels. This demarcates the boutique from neighbouring coffee chains, and signals Nespresso’s claim to more privileged patrons. This strategy though, the cultivation of a particular customer through aesthetic design and subtle flattery, is not unique. For decades, Starbucks also contrived a “special” coffee experience. Moreover, while the Starbucks model strikes a very different sensorial chord to that of Nespresso (in terms of décor, target consumer and so on) it effectively groomed and prepped everyday coffee drinkers to a level of relative self-sufficiency and expertise—and therein is the link between Starbucks’s mass-marketed approach and Nespresso’s timely arrival. Starbucks opened its first store in 1971, in Seattle. Three partners founded it: Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, both teachers, and Gordon Bowker, a writer. In 1982, as they opened their sixth Seattle store, they were joined by Howard Schultz. Schultz’s trip to Italy the following year led to an entrepreneurial epiphany to which he now attributes Starbucks’s success. Inspired by how cafés in Italy, particularly the espresso bars in Milan, were vibrant social hubs, Schultz returned to the US with a newfound sensitivity to ambience and attitude. In 1987, Schultz bought Starbucks outright and stated his business philosophy thus: “We aren’t in the coffee business, serving people. We are in the people business, serving coffee” (quoted in Ruzich 432). This was articulated most clearly in how Schultz structured Starbucks as the ultimate “third place”, a welcoming amalgam of aromas, music, furniture, textures, literature and free WiFi. This transformed the café experience twofold. First, sensory overload masked the dull homogeny of a global chain with an air of warm, comforting domesticity—an inviting, everyday “home away from home.” To this end, in 1994, Schultz enlisted interior design “mastermind” Wright Massey; with his team of 45 designers, Massey created the chain’s decor blueprint, an “oasis for contemplation” (quoted in Scerri 60). At the same time though, and second, Starbucks promoted a revisionist, airbrushed version of how the coffee was produced. Patrons could see and smell the freshly roasted beans, and read about their places of origin in the free pamphlets. In this way, Starbucks merged the exotic and the cosmopolitan. The global supply chain underwent an image makeover, helped by a “new” vocabulary that familiarised its coffee drinkers with the diversity and complexity of coffee, and such terms as aroma, acidity, body and flavour. This strategy had a decisive impact on the coffee market, first in the US and then elsewhere: Starbucks oversaw a significant expansion in coffee consumption, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the decades following the Second World War, coffee consumption in the US reached a plateau. Moreover, as Steven Topik points out, the rise of this type of coffee connoisseurship actually coincided with declining per capita consumption of coffee in the US—so the social status attributed to specialised knowledge of coffee “saved” the market: “Coffee’s rise as a sign of distinction and connoisseurship meant its appeal was no longer just its photoactive role as a stimulant nor the democratic sociability of the coffee shop” (Topik 100). Starbucks’s singular triumph was to not only convert non-coffee drinkers, but also train them to a level of relative sophistication. The average “cup o’ Joe” thus gave way to the latte, cappuccino, macchiato and more, and a world of coffee hitherto beyond (perhaps above) the average American consumer became both regular and routine. By 2003, Starbucks’s revenue was US $4.1 billion, and by 2012 there were almost 20,000 stores in 58 countries. As an idealised “third place,” Starbucks functioned as a welcoming haven that flattened out and muted the realities of global trade. The variety of beans on offer (Arabica, Latin American, speciality single origin and so on) bespoke a generous and bountiful modernity; while brochures schooled patrons in the nuances of terroir, an appreciation for origin and distinctiveness that encoded cultural capital. This positioned Starbucks within a happy narrative of the coffee economy, and drew patrons into this story by flattering their consumer choices. Against the generic sameness of supermarket options, Starbucks promised distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, and diversity in its coffee offerings. For Greg Dickinson, the Starbucks experience—the scent of the beans, the sound of the grinders, the taste of the coffees—negated the abstractions of postmodern, global trade: by sensory seduction, patrons connected with something real, authentic and material. At the same time, Starbucks professed commitment to the “triple bottom line” (Savitz), the corporate mantra that has morphed into virtual orthodoxy over the last fifteen years. This was hardly surprising; companies that trade in food staples typically grown in developing regions (coffee, tea, sugar, and coffee) felt the “political-aesthetic problematization of food” (Sassatelli and Davolio). This saw increasingly cognisant consumers trying to reconcile the pleasures of consumption with environmental and human responsibilities. The “triple bottom line” approach, which ostensibly promotes best business practice for people, profits and the planet, was folded into Starbucks’s marketing. The company heavily promoted its range of civic engagement, such as donations to nurses’ associations, literacy programs, clean water programs, and fair dealings with its coffee growers in developing societies (Simon). This bode well for its target market. As Constance M. Ruch has argued, Starbucks sought the burgeoning and lucrative “bobo” class, a term Ruch borrows from David Brooks. A portmanteau of “bourgeois bohemians,” “bobo” describes the educated elite that seeks the ambience and experience of a counter-cultural aesthetic, but without the political commitment. Until the last few years, it seemed Starbucks had successfully grafted this cultural zeitgeist onto its “third place.” Ironically, the scale and scope of the brand’s success has meant that Starbucks’s claim to an ethical agenda draws frequent and often fierce attack. As a global behemoth, Starbucks evolved into an iconic symbol of advanced consumer culture. For those critical of how such brands overwhelm smaller, more local competition, the brand is now synonymous for insidious, unstoppable retail spread. This in turn renders Starbucks vulnerable to protests that, despite its gestures towards sustainability (human and environmental), and by virtue of its size, ubiquity and ultimately conservative philosophy, it has lost whatever cachet or charm it supposedly once had. As Bryant Simon argues, in co-opting the language of ethical practice within an ultimately corporatist context, Starbucks only ever appealed to a modest form of altruism; not just in terms of the funds committed to worthy causes, but also to move thorny issues to “the most non-contentious middle-ground,” lest conservative customers felt alienated (Simon 162). Yet, having flagged itself as an ethical brand, Starbucks became an even bigger target for anti-corporatist sentiment, and the charge that, as a multinational giant, it remained complicit in (and one of the biggest benefactors of) a starkly inequitable and asymmetric global trade. It remains a major presence in the world coffee market, and arguably the most famous of the coffee chains. Over the last decade though, the speed and intensity with which Nespresso has grown, coupled with its atypical approach to consumer engagement, suggests that, in terms of brand equity, it now offers a more compelling point of difference than Starbucks. Brand “Me” Insofar as the Nespresso system depends on a consumer market versed in the intricacies of quality coffee, Starbucks can be at least partly credited for nurturing a more refined palate amongst everyday coffee drinkers. Yet while Starbucks courted the “average” consumer in its quest for market control, saturating the suburban landscape with thousands of virtually indistinguishable stores, Nespresso marks a very different sensibility. Put simply, Nespresso inverts the logic of a coffee house as a “third place,” and patrons are drawn not to socialise and relax but to pursue their own highly individualised interests. The difference with Starbucks could not be starker. One visitor to the Bloomingdale boutique (in New York’s fashionable Soho district) described it as having “the feel of Switzerland rather than Seattle. Instead of velvet sofas and comfy music, it has hard surfaces, bright colours and European hostesses” (Gapper 9). By creating a system that narrows the gap between production and consumption, to the point where Nespresso boutiques advertise the coffee brand but do not promote on-site coffee drinking, the boutiques are blithely indifferent to the historical, romanticised image of the coffee house as a meeting place. The result is a coffee experience that exploits the sophistication and vanity of aspirational consumers, but ignores the socialising scaffold by which coffee houses historically and perhaps naively made some claim to community building. If anything, Nespresso restricts patrons’ contemplative field: they consider only their relationships to the brand. In turn, Nespresso offers the ultimate expression of contemporary consumer capitalism, a hyper-individual experience for a hyper-modern age. By developing a global brand that is both luxurious and niche, Nespresso became “the Louis Vuitton of coffee” (Betts 14). Where Starbucks pursued retail ubiquity, Nespresso targets affluent, upmarket cities. As chief executive Richard Giradot put it, with no hint of embarrassment or apology: “If you take China, for example, we are not speaking about China, we are speaking about Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing because you will not sell our concept in the middle of nowhere in China” (quoted in Canning 28). For this reason, while Europe accounts for 90 per cent of Nespresso sales (Betts 15), its forays into the Americas, Asia and Australasia invariably spotlights cities that are already iconic or emerging economic hubs. The first boutique in Latin America, for instance, was opened in Jardins, a wealthy suburb in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Nespresso, Nestlé has popularised a coffee experience neatly suited to contemporary consumer trends: Club members inhabit a branded world as hermetically sealed as the aluminium pods they purchase and consume. Besides the Club’s phone, fax and online distribution channels, pods can only be bought at the boutiques, which minimise even the potential for serendipitous mingling. The baristas are there primarily for product demonstrations, whilst highly trained staff recite the machines’ strengths (be they in design or utility), or information about the actual coffees. For Club members, the boutique service is merely the human extension of Nespresso’s online presence, whereby product information becomes increasingly tailored to increasingly individualised tastes. In the boutique, this emphasis on the individual is sold in terms of elegance, expedience and privilege. Nespresso boasts that over 70 per cent of its workforce is “customer facing,” sharing their passion and knowledge with Club members. Having already received and processed the product information (through the website, boutique staff, and promotional brochures), Club members need not do anything more than purchase their pods. In some of the more recently opened boutiques, such as in Paris-Madeleine, there is even an Exclusive Room where only Club members may enter—curious tourists (or potential members) are kept out. Club members though can select their preferred Grands Crus and checkout automatically, thanks to RFID (radio frequency identification) technology inserted in the capsule sleeves. So, where Starbucks exudes an inclusive, hearth-like hospitality, the Nespresso Club appears more like a pampered clique, albeit a growing one. As described in the Financial Times, “combine the reception desk of a designer hotel with an expensive fashion display and you get some idea what a Nespresso ‘coffee boutique’ is like” (Wiggins and Simonian 10). Conclusion Instead of sociability, Nespresso puts a premium on exclusivity and the knowledge gained through that exclusive experience. The more Club members know about the coffee, the faster and more individualised (and “therefore” better) the transaction they have with the Nespresso brand. This in turn confirms Zygmunt Bauman’s contention that, in a consumer society, being free to choose requires competence: “Freedom to choose does not mean that all choices are right—there are good and bad choices, better and worse choices. The kind of choice eventually made is the evidence of competence or its lack” (Bauman 43-44). Consumption here becomes an endless process of self-fashioning through commodities; a process Eva Illouz considers “all the more strenuous when the market recruits the consumer through the sysiphian exercise of his/her freedom to choose who he/she is” (Illouz 392). In a status-based setting, the more finely graded the differences between commodities (various places of origin, blends, intensities, and so on), the harder the consumer works to stay ahead—which means to be sufficiently informed. Consumers are locked in a game of constant reassurance, to show upward mobility to both themselves and society. For all that, and like Starbucks, Nespresso shows some signs of corporate social responsibility. In 2009, the company announced its “Ecolaboration” initiative, a series of eco-friendly targets for 2013. By then, Nespresso aims to: source 80 per cent of its coffee through Sustainable Quality Programs and Rainforest Alliance Certified farms; triple its capacity to recycle used capsules to 75 per cent; and reduce the overall carbon footprint required to produce each cup of Nespresso by 20 per cent (Nespresso). This information is conveyed through the brand’s website, press releases and brochures. However, since such endeavours are now de rigueur for many brands, it does not register as particularly innovative, progressive or challenging: it is an unexceptional (even expected) part of contemporary mainstream marketing. Indeed, the use of actor George Clooney as Nespresso’s brand ambassador since 2005 shows shrewd appraisal of consumers’ political and cultural sensibilities. As a celebrity who splits his time between Hollywood and Lake Como in Italy, Clooney embodies the glamorous, cosmopolitan lifestyle that Nespresso signifies. However, as an actor famous for backing political and humanitarian causes (having raised awareness for crises in Darfur and Haiti, and backing calls for the legalisation of same-sex marriage), Clooney’s meanings extend beyond cinema: as a celebrity, he is multi-coded. Through its association with Clooney, and his fusion of star power and worldly sophistication, the brand is imbued with semantic latitude. Still, in the television commercials in which Clooney appears for Nespresso, his role as the Hollywood heartthrob invariably overshadows that of the political campaigner. These commercials actually pivot on Clooney’s romantic appeal, an appeal which is ironically upstaged in the commercials by something even more seductive: Nespresso coffee. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Collateral Casualties of Consumerism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7.1 (2007): 25–56. Betts, Paul. “Nestlé Refines its Arsenal in the Luxury Coffee War.” Financial Times 28 Apr. (2010): 14. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Butler, Reg. “The Nespresso Route to a Perfect Espresso.” Tea & Coffee Trade Journal 172.4 (2000): 50. Canning, Simon. “Nespresso Taps a Cultural Thirst.” The Australian 26 Oct. (2009): 28. Dickinson, Greg. “Joe’s Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.4 (2002): 5–27. Gapper, John. “Lessons from Nestlé’s Coffee Break.” Financial Times 3 Jan. (2008): 9. Gaudio, Rudolf P. “Coffeetalk: StarbucksTM and the Commercialization of Casual Conversation.” Language in Society 32.5 (2003): 659–91. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962. Illouz, Eva. “Emotions, Imagination and Consumption: A New Research Agenda.” Journal of Consumer Culture 9 (2009): 377–413. Karababa, EmInegül, and GüIIz Ger. “Early Modern Ottoman Coffehouse Culture and the Formation of the Consumer Subject." Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 737–60 Kjeldgaard, Dannie, and Jacob Ostberg. “Coffee Grounds and the Global Cup: Global Consumer Culture in Scandinavia”. Consumption, Markets and Culture 10.2 (2007): 175–87. Kleinman, Sharon S. “Café Culture in France and the United States: A Comparative Ethnographic Study of the Use of Mobile Information and Communication Technologies.” Atlantic Journal of Communication 14.4 (2006): 191–210. Luckins, Tanja. “Flavoursome Scraps of Conversation: Talking and Hearing the Cosmopolitan City, 1900s–1960s.” History Australia 7.2 (2010): 31.1–31.16. Markides, Constantinos C. “A Dynamic View of Strategy.” Sloan Management Review 40.3 (1999): 55. Nespresso. “Ecolaboration Initiative Directs Nespresso to Sustainable Success.” Nespresso Media Centre 2009. 13 Dec. 2011. ‹http://www.nespresso.com›. O’Brien, Mary. “A Shot at the Big Time.” The Age 21 Jun. (2011): 16. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Purpura, Linda. “New Espresso Machines to Tempt the Palate.” The Weekly Home Furnishings Newspaper 3 May (1993): 116. Purpura, Linda. “Espresso: Grace under Pressure.” The Weekly Home Furnishings Newspaper 16 Dec. (1991): 88. Reguly, Eric. “No Ordinary Joe: Nestlé Pulls off Caffeine Coup.” The Globe and Mail 6 Jul. (2009): B1. Ruzich, Constance M. “For the Love of Joe: The Language of Starbucks.” The Journal of Popular Culture 41.3 (2008): 428–42. Sassatelli, Roberta, and Federica Davolio. “Consumption, Pleasure and Politics: Slow Food and the Politico-aesthetic Problematization of Food.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10.2 (2010): 202–32. Savitz, Andrew W. The Triple Bottom Line: How Today’s Best-run Companies are Achieving Economic, Social, and Environmental Success—And How You Can Too. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006. Scerri, Andrew. “Triple Bottom-line Capitalism and the ‘Third Place’.” Arena Journal 20 (2002/03): 57–65. Simon, Bryant. “Not Going to Starbucks: Boycotts and the Out-sourcing of Politics in the Branded World.” Journal of Consumer Culture 11.2 (2011): 145–67. Simonian, Haig. “Nestlé Doubles Nespresso Output.” FT.Com 10 Jun. (2009). 2 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0dcc4e44-55ea-11de-ab7e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1tgMPBgtV›. Topik, Steven. “Coffee as a Social Drug.” Cultural Critique 71 (2009): 81–106. Wiggins, Jenny, and Haig Simonian. “How to Serve a Bespoke Cup of Coffee.” Financial Times 3 Apr. (2007): 10.